


Perihelion

by moolktea



Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: 5 second nameless OC appearance, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Anal Sex, Angst, Assisted Suicide, F/F, Fluff, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Past Character Death, Past Child Abuse, Slow Burn, Suicide Attempt, Temporary Character Death, Vampire Nero, depression dante, nero propaganda, very vaguely described sex scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-01-13 17:28:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 106,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18473662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moolktea/pseuds/moolktea
Summary: Between his semi-murderous, demonic-ritual performing brother and his two devil hunter best and only friends, Dante doesn't have much more room in his life for the supernatural. Fate, naturally, decides to drop a sassy, kind of angry, but mostly cute nineteen (hundred) year old vampire into his life.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> eurgh this chapter came off as kind of exposition-y even tho i was trying to avoid that but yay vampires  
> the number of chapters is very subject to change cuz my fic plans are always less stable than my wifi connection  
> also history professor dante inspired by PlayingChello's teacher-student au fic

Of all the days in the year, Dante’s birthday is definitely the worst.

His birthday starts the exact same way it has done for about ten years, when he rolls over in bed at six in the morning, having laid awake for the entirety of the previous night. He knows, before he even bothers to check, that there are exactly two notifications on his phone--a text from Lady and a voicemail from Trish. 

He doesn’t need to listen them when he already knows what they’re going to say. Besides, they all know that Dante, on this particular day more so than others, can hardly be bothered to listen to their advice. Still, it’s a nice gesture on their part, he supposes. A birthday tradition from the only two friends he has left in his life, the others having disappeared somewhere over the years.

In two hours, Dante has to go to work. 

He will have to drag himself out of bed, force some semblance of breakfast into his tightly knotted stomach, and stand in front of one hundred and fifty or so college-age students and bounce history facts off of their heads, all while pretending he isn’t planning to get absolutely shit-faced drunk the second he comes back home.

He’ll have to be himself, and, really, that’s the worst possible thing to be, isn’t it?

Dante smiles darkly to himself, even with no one to see it. Trish and Lady would kill him for thinking this way, but it happens every year, and he always makes it out of his temporary cloud of self-pity and hatred more or less unscathed, so why bother to stop?

Distantly, he wonders, as he always does, how this day would go for him if Dante  _ weren’t  _ so completely fucked in the head. He’d definitely have more than Trish and Lady to hang around him, that’s for certain. Maybe he’d actually answer the ladies’ calls and open up about his screwed up emotions instead of poisoning his liver one bottle at a time. 

Maybe he’d be able to stop thinking for one second about how it’s Vergil’s birthday, too, and how a mass murderer like him probably can’t celebrate it too well in the relative comfort of maximum security prison.

Dante still isn’t sure why he feels so much like he’s in mourning when really, he’s not. It’s not as if his brother is  _ gone _ , even if he’s locked up like an animal. He has it better than any of his victims, at least, who are all very much dead and will never have their birthdays again.

His brother’s presence is still everywhere Dante looks. Vergil’s unopened letters are burning a hole in his locked bedroom drawer, the one picture of him that hasn’t gone up in ashes is still folded up and tucked deep in the back, and Dante can never quite bring himself to throw away his half of the keepsake amulet he shares with his brother, no matter how deeply pissed off and unhappy looking at it makes him.

But whenever Dante thinks, as he almost always does, about going to actually visit him, his heart closes off and his brain shuts down and he just gets drunk instead.

So Dante is stuck like this. He’s a man in his early thirties with only two real friends and one living family member who he hasn’t seen in ten years, and the only achievements to his name are his career as a history professor and his massive drinking problem.

But, hey--what’s there  _ not  _ to like about turning a year older?

Work goes about as well as one could expect, with these kinds of thoughts swirling about in his mind. 

Dante feels a bit bad. Normally, he’s very much into teaching, the subject of history ranking quite high on his list of favorite things, right up there next to pizza. 

In fact, it’s probably his passion as an educator and his general do-what-you-like attitude towards rules that has students continuously signing up for his class in droves. That, or it’s because about half the female--and maybe male, too--students on campus have not-so-secret pictures of him saved on their phones or stashed in between their pillows.

Either way, his popularity has had him tenured for a while, now, and Dante is more than happy with the job security that it affords him. It also provides him with a convenient excuse to be the asshole he is today. Over the years, his past and present students have become sharply aware that today is the one day that Dante is essentially a non-functioning human being for, and have taken it upon themselves to mostly leave him be.

It leaves him getting away with about less than thirty minutes of lecture overall before he releases them early and manages to escape into some quiet corner of the campus without any further questions.

Lucky him, all alone with his thoughts.

At least until the buzzing of his phone becomes too persistent to ignore, and he finally answers it with a sigh, leaning his head back against the wall.

“How’s it going, ladies?” Dante drawls, a headache already starting to form underneath his skin. “Do anything fun today?”

On the other end of the line, he hears gunshots, followed by Trish’s smooth voice cursing out whatever supernatural being she and Lady had likely just dispatched. 

“Sure,” she answers, sounding a bit breathless but no worse for the wear. “Just killed a pretty nasty piece of shit. Nephilim, I think. Not as bad as a vampire, I guess, but still pretty bad.”

“If you say so.”

Lady and Trish sure are crazy--not many people take up the profession of hunting down the various supernatural entities that plague the city both day and night, Dante included, but someone has to do it, and the two ladies are just close enough to the right side of insanity to actually enjoy their work.

“Look, Dante…” Trish says slowly, after a long pause, and even though Dante knows exactly what’s coming next, he never could bring himself to hang up on either of them. “I know today is...well, today, but...try and spare your liver this one, yeah?”

“Let’s not ruin our long-standing relationship with cheap lies,” Dante retorts, idly stretching his legs out in front of him. 

He hears Lady at the other end, a quick, “Hey, is that the old bastard?” before the phone is presumably snatched out of Trish’s hands. “Dante--we got a new recruit coming in today. Maybe you can come to check him out yourself. He’s an interesting guy, lots of tattoos, reads weird books. Poetry, I think. Come get dinner with us instead of fucking off with pizza.”

Trish and Lady go through new recruits faster than Dante goes through his liquor cabinet, which is incredibly impressive. Most people who get drawn there by promises of exciting lives and good pay are eventually scared off the instant they hit their first near-death experience. People with common senses and good heads on their shoulders just don’t get into the devil hunting business, after all. 

Which means Dante would make a perfect one, of course, but after everything that’s happened with Vergil, he can’t quite bring himself to devote his life to doing something that hits so close to home.

Either way, both the girls know that Dante, fueled by both curiosity and personal amusement, can’t resist coming to see what kind of fresh face they’ve dragged out from the streets each time around. Plus, free food is not food that Dante can ever afford to turn down, both morally and financially. 

Screw them for knowing him too well.

He lets out a long, perhaps a bit exaggerated sigh, just so both Lady and Trish can fully hear his vocalized displeasure. “Guess you caught me. What time?”

“Dunno. Gonna be late, probably. This job looks like it might run long. Let’s say ten?”

Eleven is an extremely late hour to be having dinner, but Dante can’t exactly use that as an escape excuse, not when his own idea of fine dining constitutes of pizza and beer at around three-thirty in the morning onwards.

It’s annoying, though--he can’t even indulge in his usual birthday plans and get drunk before then because he has to see Lady and Trish and some random stranger whose opinion Dante couldn’t care less about. But if he’s being associated with Lady and Trish, as one of their close friends, he doesn’t want to drag down their reputation by showing up completely plastered.

“Yeah. I’ll be there. Don’t make an old man wait.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Lady answers. There’s another pause, then, in which Dante imagines the two women are looking at each other in some sort of silent communication. “And...happy birthday, Dante.”

Dante feels his head thud lightly against the back of the wall as he shuts his eyes, trying to ignore the sudden tightness in his chest, the unpleasant twist in his stomach, and only focuses on the part of him that feels somewhat warm at the platitude. The part of him that insistently pretends his brother doesn’t exist.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

The line goes dead after his acknowledgment, and he stuffs his phone back into his pocket and takes a moment to actually think about his situation. It’s his birthday, and he’s sitting alone on the floor of one of the empty staff lounges, and the only reason he’s about to go out at all today is that his two only friends are relentless hyenas who refuse to let him wallow in his own self-pity.

When he was growing up and was asked what he wanted to be, he’s pretty certain that “depressed and lonely and alcoholic” was not amongst his top three choices.

He laughs softly, bitterly to himself, covering his face with a hand. He isn’t crying--he doesn’t do that emotional shit in public, never has and never will--but he sure does feel like it. So instead, he just sits there, with his legs splayed out in front of him, and his eyes tightly shut and pretends that he’s put-together enough on the inside to go back out and face the world.

It’s already noon, anyways. He only has twelve more hours of this shitty day left to endure, and then he can go to bed and act like it never happened. With luck, he won’t even have to do _ that _ . 

It’s pretty impossible to go through the motions of life if he never wakes up for them, after all.

* * *

 

 

Eleven hours later, Dante is cold, wet, and very much regretting all of his life choices within the last two days or so.

Honestly, all things considering, he should have expected things to go this way.

He’s caught in the sudden downpour of rain sweeping through the very bad area of town that he’s stumbling around in, and is very, very lost. His phone died about two hours ago--largely his fault for not being able to be bothered to charge it, and he can’t, for the life of him, seem to remember the address that Lady told him over the phone.

An honorable testament to his increasingly old age, it would seem.

Anyway, as it stands, the best decision is probably for Dante to turn around and go back to his apartment and call Lady and Trish to apologize for his absence. Anyone with even half a brain--or half of a person that they once knew--is more than well aware that, unless you were a devil hunter, or at least armed to the teeth like one, staying out at night is a very, very bad idea.

As a history professor, Dante’s pretty confident in his statement that the world has always been fucked up in this way. No one quite knows how it happened or where it originated and the like, but for the last few thousand years, the line between the human world and the demon world has been pretty blurry, with creatures on both sides easily crossing over. 

Except very few humans seemed to want to enter the demon world, for some inexplicable reason, so the exchange of beings is mostly pretty one-sided. Angry spirits, devils, fallen angels, vampires--all that good stuff. Of course, there’s the rare breeds--humans who sell their souls or make pacts or blond bonds with the demonic creatures, in pursuit of money or happiness or power.

Extremely rare for that kind of thing to happen, but, then again, Vergil always did like to be special.

Dante shakes his head, pushing back his sopping bangs from his face. He’s in desperate need of a drink, and really needs to figure out where he is before he can allow his mind to spiral off into a negative tangent. Not that that’s going to be an easy task, with sheets of rain obscuring his vision in the already dark night.

He feels a chill crawl up his spine, the hairs on the back of his neck sticking up. Lady and Trish keep offering some of their guns to him for protection, and when he sees them next, he might actually take them. It’s easy enough for him to understand how utterly screwed he is without them.

Dante wouldn’t consider himself helpless by any means, usually. He’s more than big enough to pretty much dust any human opponent in a hand-to-hand fight, and has had nearly a lifetime of competitive martial arts training to bulk up his muscles and his reflexes. But demons are different--there’s really not a lot they can be killed by, due to both their supernatural regeneration and the fact that they just weren’t human, and the method of executing them varies between each type.

Silver is generally an all-purpose solution for this kind of thing, but silver weaponry itself is pretty hard to come by in this day and age, and even then, it doesn’t always do the trick. God knows how much of Lady and Trish’s budget has gone down the drain, funneled into silver bullets and the arms produced specifically to fire them.

Dante shivers, again, then pauses, because something is definitely wrong.

Even in his present, very soggy condition, he isn’t the type to get cold easily--he wears his signature red leather jacket purely as a stylistic choice rather than as a protection against the elements, even during the middle of the winter. It’s still late August, not even fall, and Dante is  _ cold? _

Some sort of long-dormant survival instinct awakens in the back of his mind and tells him to  _ run _ .

The air around him turns even colder than normal, the chill from the wind and rain incomparable to the sudden, icy chill that fills his veins, and Dante thinks to himself that now would be a very good time to put that escape plan in his mind into action.

Except, as he finds when he goes to move, he can’t.

There’s a supernatural kind of fear choking him, wrapping tight vines around his too-fast heart and rooting him firmly in place, making him easy pickings for any creature that just so happens to come by. Experimentally, he struggles against it, feeling some of the effects dissipate underneath his resistance, but it’s not enough. Maybe if he had more time to free himself, he could, but he clearly doesn’t.

Half a second later, a bruising force slams into him, pinning him to the brick wall behind him, his back crashing into the hard surface and sending a shock through his entire body that he feels in his bones. 

“What’s a human like you doing out here?” The low, deep voice of his attacker purrs, and the creature is close enough that Dante can see, even in the dim, rain-obscured glow of the moonlight, the glinting of fangs poking out from its curled lip.

A vampire, then.

Just Dante’s luck.

Vampires are pretty much the worst of the bunch, the hardest the kill and the ones who actually consider humans as their main food source. The only upside was probably how rare they seemed to be, considering how the qualifications for even becoming a vampire, other than  _ death _ , were something like eternal sorrow and hatred for all humanity and other things Dante himself was very much into at around thirteen years old.

“Just out for a walk,” he manages to choke out, not quite able to free himself from the magical fear surrounding him. “You know how it is. Nice night outside and all.”

The vampire raises an eyebrow, looking dubiously around them at the falling sheets of rain, ears pricking at the distant rumble of thunder in the background. “Oh, yes. Must be my lucky day--for such a  _ tasty  _ smelling human to come strolling into my territory.”

He’s built like most vampires are, on the taller and slender side, and Dante could probably easily throw him off if not for the tiny issue of the vampire’s hypnotic gaze paralyzing him. The phenomenon of how vampires most easily catch their prey has been pretty well documented by researchers who studied the exsanguinated corpses of their victims and noted the complete lack of struggle by any of the now dead human, and the general consensus amongst the people was to never look directly into a vampire’s eyes, if you wanted to have a chance of living.

A bit too late for Dante, now. But then again, he’s always been too late for the important things his entire life--why bother to change that up at the clear end of it?

Maybe this is the universe’s way of delivering some kind of twisted karma onto him, as punishment for not having stopped Vergil from becoming who he was all those years back. Or maybe just for being a shitty person in general.

The fact is, he’s about to die, and there’s absolutely nothing he can do about it. He can’t even look away or shut his eyes and pretend like he’s not about to be slowly drained of every drop of blood in his body, like he isn’t going to be able to feel his organs slowly shutting down, one by one, like he won’t die a slow and painful death and leave his friends to wonder what happened to him.

_ Damn it. _

Lady and Trish.

If Dante has one regret about leaving this world behind, it’ll be them.

The both of them, Lady especially, have seen enough of the people they care about dying to the hands of demonic creatures, and Dante really doesn’t want them to have to do it again. They would have to leave a hundred unanswered calls on his phone before deciding to look for him, and eventually, they’d find...

The vampire presses his face into Dante’s neck, inhaling deeply, the pointed tip of his fangs scraping against Dante’s fluttering pulse, barely light enough to avoid drawing blood. 

“I guess I should stop playing with my food, hm? I wonder how you’ll  _ taste… _ ”

Well. He’s lived for long enough anyway, he supposes. Dante stops fighting against his mental restraints and allows himself to lose himself in the vampire’s eyes, which aren’t too bad to look at, honestly, as far as last sights go.

_ Happy birthday to me, I guess. _

“Hey!”

Both of them freeze at the interruption--not that Dante can actually freeze up much more--the vampire briefly flicking his gaze to the side, some of its enchantment wearing off with the break in his concentration, enough for Dante to be able to turn his head, as well.

There’s a kid standing somewhat close to the right of them, a wary expression on his face, his hands shoved into the pockets of his navy blue hoodie. He’s just as soaking wet as the rest of them, his long white bangs dripping water into his bright blue eyes.

Dante wants to tell this kid to run, because while Dante isn’t completely opposed to himself dying, he is very much against the slaughter of innocent life, and, so far, this kid’s only crime seems to have been to walk in on the wrong scene at the wrong time and to decide to interrupt. 

But then he really looks into the eyes glaring at him and feels the breath catch in his throat, electric tingles shooting through up numb fingertips to his foggy brain. There’s an almost ethereal depth in the shade of blue, years and years of knowledge and emotion framed by that soft looking face. His skin is unnaturally pale, and, maybe it’s a trick of the light, but he almost seems to give off a faint sort of glow. 

Whatever this boy is, he’s definitely not human.

The vampire pressing down on him has clearly come to the same conclusion, because his grip on Dante slackens, and he steps away, muscles uncoiling like a waking snake, a sly grin stretched across his face.

_ “Oh? _ You don’t smell like anything...any living creature, that is. Tell me,  _ child _ , are you here to steal my prey?”

There’s a clear threat in his smooth tone, a promise of retribution lazily hanging off the edge of his calm words. 

The boy tenses up as the vampire takes a step forward, Dante all but forgotten against the wall. He should really be taking this opportunity to get the hell out of here, he knows, but even though the vampire’s spell over him is broken, he’s still stuck where he is. He can’t tear his eyes away from the newcomer, can’t help but be curious about what will happen to him.

“I’m not a kid!” he snaps, taking his hands out of his pockets and clenching his fists at his sides. “And he’s not your anything--so just fuck off and let him go, bastard.”

There’s a long moment in which the two stare at each other, probably sizing each other up, and Dante has to admit that it doesn’t look too good for the kid. He’s on the smaller side, enough so that the top of his head would probably only just barely come up to Dante’s chin, and his build is even leaner than that of the vampire’s, like he hasn’t eaten a proper meal in ages.

“Interesting,” the vampire says at last. “You are obviously one of us, and yet, I sense no thirst for blood in you.”

“Yeah, well maybe not all of ‘ _ us’  _ are fucking nasty like that.”

The kid bares his teeth in response, and Dante catches a glimpse of equally pointed teeth poking out from underneath his lip. He blinks, unsettled by this turn of events. Not once in the entire documented history of the negative human relationship with demonic creatures had there ever been an instance where a vampire would step in to save a human.

They’d fight amongst themselves over prey, sure, but the kid didn’t seem too invested in sucking up Dante’s blood if the current conversation was anything to go by. Which meant that either the kid had some kind of ulterior motive for helping Dante or was just genuinely nice at heart like that.

Dante was pretty much completely willing to bank it on the former, considering how vampires didn’t even  _ have  _ physically functioning hearts.

“Either way, am I correct in assuming that you wish to stand in my way?”

The older vampire is clearly impatient to get back to draining Dante of his blood, his curiosity about the new arrival quickly expiring.

“Yeah. I guess I do. Though it’d be a lot nicer for both of us if you would just turn around and leave, maybe.”

Time seems to slow around them for a long moment, as the three of them just stand there, fixed in their positions, just breathing and looking at each other.

Then, faster than Dante’s human eye can track, the vampire launches himself at the kid, and the both of them go down in a tangle of thrashing limbs and sharp claws. Dante isn’t able to make out what’s actually happening in the dim moonlight, not even if the kid is losing or winning, but the first option seems a lot more probable, all things considered.

A loud, too-human yelp of pain cuts through the air, followed by a sharp crack and a far more inhuman sounding screech as the kid plants a solid kick on his attacker’s abdomen and throws him roughly into the wall. Before Dante can fully register what’s happening, his wrist is grabbed and he’s being dragged off into a run by the kid.

The boy is fast as hell, and Dante, who is already pretty athletic himself, has to scramble to keep up with him, unsure of where he’s even being taken, but he trusts that the other knows these streets better than he does. 

“Do you--have a house or something?” The kid asks, somewhat breathlessly, keeping his eyes ahead of him, scanning the area for any threats lurking about in the streets. They’re in an extremely notorious part of town, and the kid’s caution is more than justified.

“Not around here,” Dante manages to pant back, and the kid’s grip on his wrist gets about five times tighter as he lets out a noise of what is possibly exasperation.

Dante isn't sure how long they run for, twisting and turning down countless streets and alleyways before the kid finally drags them around the corner and kicks open the door to an empty, possibly abandoned building, and roughly hauls Dante inside with surprising strength. He slams the door shut a second later, collapsing with his back against it, his hand pressed against his stomach as he tries to catch his breath.

Dante is no better, coughing wetly as he leans his head back, his heart racing so frantically in his chest he’s worried it might stop. The frantic race through the rain coupled with his near-death experience wasn’t doing any wonders for his body, and he can still feel the rush of adrenaline from it all coursing through his veins.

Still, a few words are definitely in order.

“Thanks for the help,” he wheezes out, gently rubbing at his chest.

The kid is silent for a few moments longer, save for his shaky breathing, and he grimaces as he shifts slightly, not moving his hand away from his side.

“What the hell is a human like you doing out here?” he echoes the other vampire unknowingly, except the kid’s tone is a lot less creepy and lot more angry.

The baby blue eyes have gone back to glaring at him, standing out against the paleness of the boy’s skin and hair, a little bit of fang poking out from his tightly pressed lips, and Dante can’t help but feel like he’s looking at a particularly angry baby rabbit.

It’s kind of cute, actually.

“I, uh, got lost,” Dante admits sheepishly, rubbing at the back of his neck, and the kid gives him an apparently disgusted look.

“Ugh. Guess that happens when humans like you get old. Don’t you know you’re not supposed to walk around at night, grandpa?”

“Hey, no cracks about my age,  _ kid.” _

_ “I’m not a kid!” _

Dante raises an eyebrow, looking the boy over. He doesn’t look like he could possibly be any older than twenty, which, in Dante’s book, is a kid. Besides, the other vampire had called him a child, earlier, implying that even by vampiric standards, this boy didn’t quite meet the cut.

“Well, you look nineteen. And I don’t have anything else to call you.”

The boy’s pale cheeks flush, telling Dante he’s pretty much right on the nose about the boy’s physical age. But...for him to be a vampire at  _ nineteen  _ didn’t have the best of implications, to say in the least.

“It’s Nero,” he grumbles, after a pause. “What about you, grandpa? Not that I should even care.”

“Call me Dante.”

Here he is, exchanging pleasantries with a literal vampire--Trish and Lady would kill him right now if they knew what he was up to. They were definitely annoyed enough with him for being a no-show at their dinner, especially considering how the most probable reason for his disappearance would be that he was passed out drunk in his own apartment.

He’s a long way from that now.

“Either way...you really saved my ass back there. Not to sound ungrateful, but this place is a real dump. Where’d you even take me, kid?”

Nero scowls at him, but his glare seems a lot less heated than before, his blue eyes looking somewhat glassy, actually. He’s silent for a long moment, as if he’s still processing Dante’s words.

“This house was abandoned a few years back. Found it afterward, and sometimes I come here. And I didn’t exactly have time to pick and choose. As long as we’re inside, he can’t smell you and hunt you down.”

Nero’s words are terse, strained with tension, and Dante frowns, sitting properly upwards to get a good look at Nero, whose energy seems to have been all but expended from pushing out that quick explanation. His gaze is unfocused, looking somewhere off to the side, his body limp against the door and in clear danger of falling over.

“Hey...you okay?”

Nero’s eyes snap briefly back to him, defensive and angry, and he presses his hand more tightly against his side. Dante’s gaze follows the movement, and, despite how wet from the rain Nero is, he can still see the faint glow of something like golden liquid slowly trickling from between Nero’s fingers.

Shit.

He recalls Nero’s brief fight with the other vampire, the sound he’d heard just before Nero had actually struck the vampire, and realizes it must have come from the boy. Dante’s stomach twists unpleasantly as he remembers the way it’d sounded, and decides that he never wants this kid to get hurt again.

“It’s just a scratch,” Nero mumbles insistently, but Dante can see the tightness in his mouth, the clear haze of pain in his eyes, the tremble in the fingers trying to staunch the sticky flow of gold from his side.

“Will it heal over?” Dante asks, just to be sure. Vampiric regeneration is pretty infamous in its efficiency and tenacity, but the kid doesn’t actually seem to be getting any better. If anything, he looks even paler by the second, so much that his skin is starting to actually match the color of his hair.

Nero seems to curl in on himself slightly and looks to the side. 

“It’s...different if the injury comes from another vampire.”

The kid is lying to his face and is not doing a very good job of it.

“But your kind tear each other up all the time in territory disputes and whatnot. And yet there are still so many of you running around.”

Dante regrets his words when Nero flares up again, flinching at the pain the movement of sitting up straight brings him, but glaring at Dante with full force nonetheless. 

_ “Don’t _ call them my kind! I’m not part of them.”

Dante hurriedly holds his hands out in a placating gesture, hoping that Nero will take the hint and relax. “Alright, alright--sorry. Guess that was pretty rude of me, considering how you’ve already proven that you’re different. But..how come your ‘scratch’ won’t heal if all of theirs do?”

Nero chews on his lip for a long moment, in which Dante is briefly concerned that he might poke himself with his own fangs before he finally sighs, blue eyes cast down at the ground.

“I don’t...have all of the same abilities. You need to drink human blood to unlock most of them.”

“Wait, are you saying that you’ve  _ never  _ drank blood before? How long have you been around?” 

No wonder the kid was so scrawny--he literally  _ never ate _ .

“I don’t know! A...a couple thousand years, maybe?” Nero snaps back, growing increasingly defensive when he sees the absolutely floored look that must be on Dante’s face. “I just...I’m not into sick shit like that!”

Dante lets out a long breath, suddenly faced with this wave of unexpected information. “But...humans become vampires by choice, right? Why’d you pick to become one if you’re so against drinking blood? Isn’t that pretty much the main attraction?”

“None of your business,” Nero clams up almost immediately, and Dante senses he’s touched on a bad topic. Less than an hour spent with this kid and Dante’s already managed to push most of his buttons. Either the kid’s got a short fuse or Dante’s just gotten spectacularly good at being an asshole over the years.

Probably both.

“Okay, sorry. Shouldn’t have asked. But, shit. You’ve been starving yourself for  _ two thousand years?  _ Jesus, kid.”

Dante can’t even go without pizza for two hours--he can’t imagine willingly cutting himself off from even basic nutrients for so long.

Nero looks at him suspiciously for a long while, but eventually relaxes, letting his head lean against the door again.

“It’s not that bad,” he reassures Dante softly, as if  _ Dante  _ is the one in need of comfort, and not the starving, bleeding, shivering kid curled up on the floor of an abandoned house. “I think I’m different. I don’t really feel the craving for blood that the others seem to. Good for me, I guess.”

Dante can’t wrap his head around it--how expectation-defying Nero is in almost every way, and the more he looks at the kid, who has his arms wrapped around his entire body now, looking very sad and small in his too-large hoodie, the more he feels like he has to defy his own expectations and help the kid out. After the whole mess with Vergil, he’d sworn to himself that he’d never work with a demonic creature for as long as he lived, but Nero is so obviously  _ different _ .

“Look, kid…” he starts, and Nero barely has enough energy left to look up at him, the effort of raising his head causing his face to pale even further. “I owe you. And I don’t like seeing you like this. So...you said that you can’t heal up because you don’t drink human blood, right?”

Nero nods slowly, awareness dawning across his face as the look in his eyes turns horrified.

“Are you suggesting--”

“That you drink from me? Yeah. I am.”

Nero hisses, flattening himself against the wall with as much force as he’s capable of, incredible amounts of fear and disgust on his face. 

“Fuck no! It’ll get better on its own in a few weeks. I don’t need your blood, or  _ anyone’s  _ blood, for that matter!”

Dante cautiously inches forward, trying to get closer to the boy without startling him any further. He still hasn’t been able to see how bad the wound is, not with the way Nero is covering it up and purposefully angling his body away from him, and he really doesn’t want Nero agitating it any further by trying to get away from Dante.

“Well, why not?” he asks carefully, hoping to reason with him. “I’m offering it willingly to you, and besides, you got hurt in the process of saving  _ my  _ life. There’s nothing wrong with doing it, Nero.”

Nero swallows harshly, his eyes trained on Dante’s, as if he’s searching for some sign of dishonesty or trickery on Dante’s part, and Dante does his best to keep his face as open and friendly as possible.

Now that Dante has said his piece, the look in Nero’s blue eyes is almost longing, and the boy digs his nails into his own skin, apparently trying to regain some measure of self-control. 

“I mean, it’s just…I’ve never…”

Dante moves forward again, and, sensing no negative reaction from the boy, gently settles himself next to Nero so that they’re both leaning against the door, and he can look properly down at the boy.

“I promise that it’s okay.”

Dante isn’t too sure how much his reassurance is worth, especially to a boy who he’s never met before, but Nero’s face turns softer, his eyes infinitely more trusting. Suddenly, Dante has the sneaking suspicion that Nero hasn’t been shown any sort of kindness like this in a long, long time.

It’s an unexpectedly painful thought, especially considering how willing Nero had been to step between an obviously older, stronger vampire and Dante, even while knowing he’d be at a disadvantage, his vampiric abilities locked behind his self-imposed dietary restrictions.

“Okay,” Nero finally whispers, before clearing his throat and speaking again with some measure of his usual strength. “But...but I don’t do that biting at the neck shit. That’s really weird.”

Dante chuckles lightly, reaching out and resting a hand on the boy’s still damp hair, ruffling the messy locks between his fingers. 

It’s a gesture he hasn’t performed in a while, not in around ten years, actually. He hasn’t felt like this in a long time, so strangely easygoing and free of worries, but being around Nero makes everything a little lighter, somehow.

“It’s your lucky day,” he answers, producing his trusty pocket knife from the folds of his damp coat. Speaking of which…

Dante strips off all of his upper layers of clothing and tosses them into the corner, much to Nero’s apparent surprise, because the noise of alarm that the boy makes is amusingly high-pitched. He glances at the boy, who is pointedly looking away from him, his pale cheeks dusted with pink.

“Sitting around with wet clothes on is a one-way ticket to hypothermia. Or at least to getting sick. Would take off my pants, too, but I don’t think you can handle that,” he laughs, the sound surprising even himself, but Nero’s reaction is just a bit too cute.

“At least warn me next time, you perverted old man!” Nero snaps, looking nervously back at him. “I forgot how fragile your human bodies are. Good thing I don’t have to worry about this shit.”

“Again, lucky you.”

Dante flips the knife open in his hand and stretches out his left palm in front of him, making a decently sized nick in the fleshy part of his palm. Blood wells to the surface instantly, dripping from the wound, and he holds his hand out to Nero, who is watching the flow of red with wide eyes.

“Drink up.”

The boy uncurls himself, both of his smaller hands coming up around Dante’s wrist as he looks tentatively between Dante’s gaze and his bloodied palm, as if searching for one last sign of reassurance. Dante merely nods, and Nero slowly lowers his head, a dark red flush on his cheeks, and begins to lap experimentally at Dante’s hand.

The second that Nero actually swallows his blood, something changes in the kid. His bright blue eyes grow more dazed, his earlier embarrassment at the situation fading away, his tiny little kitten licks turning more eager until he’s practically sucking on Dante’s fingers and Dante himself is having a very,  _ very  _ difficult time forcing away some wildly inappropriate thoughts.

The fact that Nero is actively drinking his own blood and the sight of his blood on Nero’s lips and over his own hand should probably be a turnoff, but maybe Dante is so fucked in the head that even that doesn’t work, because it’s really not. 

The kid is making a whole bunch of little sighing, half-gasping noises that Dante is pretty sure he doesn’t realize he’s letting out and his tongue feels unfairly good against Dante’s skin. Nero’s teeth scrape gently against his hand once or twice, and Dante is astonished that he’s still able to draw the blood from his hand, because all of  Dante’s blood should be going straight southwards. Absolutely none of this is helped by the fact that Dante is completely naked from the waist up.

He’s just lucky that Nero himself is so apparently overwhelmed with his first taste of blood that he doesn’t seem to notice the tent that Dante is pitching in his jeans.

He grits his teeth, shifting very slowly in place, careful not to disturb Nero but also trying to get comfortable. As he does so, he’s able to spot the now-uncovered wound left in Nero’s side, the sight of which is more than effective at killing his slowly rising arousal. 

The gash is ugly, the golden blood of vampires still flowing freely from it, and is much larger than Dante had initially thought it was, reaching from behind Nero’s hip to right next to his navel. Tentatively, Dante reaches over and slowly pushes the layers of wet clothing upwards to get a better look at the wound.

Nero’s flesh is otherwise unmarked, signifying that he did have some measure of enhanced healing, but the injured area is pretty torn up by what looks to be a set of claws. He casts a quick glance to his own wrist, which is still in Nero’s grip, but Nero’s hands are very human looking and his nails are round and blunt.

“Kid, this is not ‘just a scratch,” Dante says without thinking and the lapping of Nero’s tongue against his fingers stops as the kid looks up, eyes hazy with confusion as he slowly comes back to himself.

Dante himself is suddenly aware of his position, practically looming over Nero, with his free hand pushed up underneath Nero’s clothes, and realizes exactly how compromising this must look. He half expects the kid to push him away and pull back, but Nero only keeps looking at him with those wide, trusting blue eyes. Dante wonders if it’s possible to get drunk off of his blood, because Nero certainly looks it.

“It’s been worse,” Nero mumbles, letting go of Dante’s wrist and laying back against the door, his body almost completely limp. “Doesn’t hurt anymore now, anyway.”

As if on cue, the wound, right before Dante’s eyes, suddenly star ts closing up, the skin repairing itself easily, leaving Nero’s skin as perfectly smooth as ever, with only the stains of his golden blood around the edge of the wound remaining to tell the tale. He lets out a low whistle, impressed with Nero’s biology despite himself.

“Damn. Sure does work fast. No wonder your--I mean, no wonder vampires like to drink their fill so often, if it does that for you.”

“Mm. Yeah.”

Nero’s eyes are fluttering as the kid clearly struggles to stay awake, and Dante feels a stab of concern as he reaches out, catching Nero before he can fall over on his side and his head can hit the ground. More gently, he lays Nero down, his cut palm stinging as he presses against the dark fabric of Nero’s hoodie.

The boy’s gaze flickers over to Dante’s large hand curled around his shoulder.

“Right...sorry. Should probably…” he makes a vague sort of motion towards Dante’s hand, and Dante holds it out to him again.

Nero goes back to licking his palm, but this time with incredible slowness, and Dante feels the skin of his palm suddenly tighten. His heart rate picks up, and the world narrows down to just him and Nero for a long moment. Nero looks up at him, his sleepy blue eyes gazing gently into Dante’s, and Dante feels a low tug in the bottom of his stomach. 

Then Nero lets go of him, and Dante looks down at his hand to see that the cut he’d made has completely faded.

Huh. That was new.

“Vampires have healing saliva?” Dante gapes at the kid, who looks more and more content to fall asleep right here, in his wet clothes, his mouth still partially covered with Dante’s blood.

“Sort of. Most just don’t use it...assholes.”

Dante smirks. Even half-asleep, Nero is sassy.

“You alright there, kid?” Dante pokes the boy gently.

Nero cracks open an eye to glare at him, but the look doesn’t have much effect, considering how sleepy he looks. His hair is only a bit damp now, and Dante figures that the drier Nero’s hair gets, the fluffier it must become. As a whole, the vampire doesn’t look very threatening.

“Tired,” Nero answers, a bit unnecessarily. “Gonna sleep.”

Dante doesn’t bother the kid anymore after that, instead glancing out the window. The rain has mostly let up now, and the moon has come out from behind the clouds, making the whole area much brighter than before. He quietly opens the door and pokes his head out of it, looking around them.

Now that his vision isn’t being blocked by inclement weather, Dante can actually tell where they are.

The house that Nero has dragged him to is actually pretty close to his own apartment, about a ten-minute jog away, and he briefly considers his options. 

Lucky for him, it’s a Friday night--or, since it must be past midnight by now, Saturday morning, so he doesn’t have to get up and go to work in less than eight hours. Still, Dante is, on principle, somewhat opposed to sleeping out in abandoned houses when his own comfortable bed is well within reach. Besides, they’re in a much safer part of town than the one that Dante had been ambushed in. 

This area is not only a lot more well-lit but is crawling with devil hunters making their nightly rounds in search of work. Most demons wouldn’t dare to come here and if they did, they’d be quickly dispatched.

There really isn’t anything stopping him from going back to his own apartment right now. Nothing except for…

Dante slowly looks over at Nero, who is sound asleep and curled up against the wooden floor. He doesn’t want to just leave the kid here--not only would it be a generally shitty thing to do, but, for some reason, every instinct that Dante has screams at him to wrap the kid up and take him back somewhere warm and safe. 

But, on the other hand, maybe it’d be too creepy. They’ve known each other for all of a few hours, and Dante already wants to take the kid home. Even if they’d had a nice set of bonding exercises when Nero kicked vampire ass and he literally handfed Nero his own blood they were still pretty much strangers. If he were Nero’s age--physical, not chronological age--he certainly doesn’t think he’d take well to waking up in an unknown man’s house.

Perhaps he will have to leave the kid.

Sighing, he stands up, picking up his clothes from where he’d thrown them in the corner. They’re almost dry, actually, meaning he must have spent a lot more time sitting next to Nero while the boy licked his hand than he’d thought.

Really put a whole new twist on the saying about time flying when you were having fun.

He pulls on his shirt and coat, checking around him to make sure he hasn’t left anything behind. Other than the very big something lying on the floor, of course. He steps out, his hand resting on the door frame, when he looks back behind him one last time.

In his sleep, Nero curls up even further, his fluffy hair fluttering against his face with each gentle breath, his face relaxed and even softer looking in his sleep. His fingers twitch lightly, his hands nearly half-covered by the sleeves of his hoodie. He makes a cute sort of noise as he shifts, one fang barely poking out from his slightly open mouth.

“Mm...don't leave me…” he murmurs softly into his hand, pleading with whoever it was he was dreaming about.

_ Fuck _ .

Two minutes later, Dante is out the door, the kid nestled in his arms.

The boy is much, much lighter than he looks, especially considering the strength that Nero must have used to kick the vampire off of him and again when he’d hauled Dante into the house. Maybe it’s a side effect of never having properly eaten until now, or it’s some bizarre vampire thing, or maybe Nero is just on the smaller side.

The reason doesn’t matter much to Dante.

What  _ does  _ matter is that Dante himself is starting to feel tired. He’s been up almost two nights in a row at this point, he’s lost a fair amount of blood to Nero, and the adrenaline of the previous events is starting to crash on him. He needs to get them back to his apartment as quickly as possible, and crawl into bed and  _ sleep _ , preferably until next year.

Unlocking the door to his apartment while simultaneously holding Nero is a bit of a struggle, but with a bit of tricky maneuvering and shifting around, he manages to get it open. He deposits Nero a bit unceremoniously onto the couch after kicking off the empty pizza boxes and beer bottles to make room for the boy, and helps pull off the boy’s hoodie.

Nero had said he couldn’t get sick, and he was probably right about that, but sleeping in damp clothes probably wasn’t the best experience for anyone to have.

His hands linger over the one layer that Nero has underneath his hoodie, wondering if it was entirely appropriate for him to change  _ all  _ of Nero’s clothes, especially while the kid was still asleep. Nero is pretty dead to the world, though, and Dante also doesn’t want his coach to get wet.

He could probably explain himself when he woke up. Probably.

Dante leaves Nero in just his boxers, then ducks into his own room, tugging out something warm looking that he himself hasn’t worn in ages, hoping it’ll fit Nero.

It doesn't. 

The kid is nearly drowning in Dante’s sweatshirt, but at least he looks comfortable.

As an afterthought, Dante drapes a blanket over Nero’s body, then carefully brushes his bangs out of his face, his hand resting in Nero’s soft hair for a too-long moment, his own exhaustion making him softer and more unguarded than normal.

“Good night, Nero,” he says quietly.

For a moment, he feels like he’s known Nero for a much longer time, for weeks or months or years. Like there’s a connection between them, still waiting to be explored. Like he has a future with this kid beyond the straight, tunneled path that Dante currently ahead of him.

Then, he takes his hand away and the moment breaks, leaving a still silence in the empty air.

Dante rubs his eyes, surprised at the sudden burst of emotion he’d felt. It’s the sleep deprivation, definitely.

He strips off his own clothes and burrows himself into his bed, briefly checking the time and plugging his phone into the charger. It’s nearly four in the morning.

With a jolt, he realizes that this is the first time in ten years that he hasn’t gotten drunk on his birthday.

_ What an accomplishment, _ he thinks dryly, but the usual bitterness of his self-deprecating thoughts isn’t there.

As he falls asleep, he almost doesn’t want to wake up again. There’s so much shit he has to face in the morning, has to call Lady and Trish and explain his absence and probably beg for their forgiveness, has to sort out all the fucked up feelings he’s always left with the day after his birthday, has to store another one of Vergil’s letters in his locked bedroom drawer.

But in the middle of it all, he imagines baby blue eyes, wide and trusting, framed by a mop of fluffy white hair and a too-young face and decides that that, if anything, is a good enough reason as any to face the next day.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahshsd this chapter is very filler i feel but it is Necessary to the plot (i swear i have one)  
> ty 2 numnum on twitter for helping with some ideas

If teaching doesn’t work out for him long term, Dante thinks that he should become a psychic. Or an empath, at the very least. He’d be great at it, too. 

In an amazing display of his supernatural powers, he awakens the moment he senses Trish’s towering fury outside of his apartment door, the sound of her harsh knocking echoing through his apartment a second later. She’s awfully worked up about something, that’s for certain.

Dante groans as he rolls out of bed, his mind foggy with sleep and the muscles in his back unusually sore, the pounding in his head matched only by the pounding at his door.

“Coming, coming,” he mutters to himself, pulling on a pair of pants and stumbling over to the entrance of his apartment in a bleary-eyed zombie walk, tugging open the door and tilting his head down to look at Trish and Lady.

“Ah, the great drunk awakens,” Trish sneers at him, pushing her way into the apartment without much resistance from Dante. 

Drunk? Dante frowns--normally, he’d take Trish’s words in stride, water off of a duck’s back, but somehow, he doesn’t think he got drunk last night. He definitely doesn’t have a hangover, but, then again, he hasn’t gotten one since he was basically a kid.

Wait.

Kid.

The memories of last night catch up to him an instant, knocking the exhaustion clean out of his mind, and he whips his head around to where Trish is standing, right next to the couch he’d laid Nero on. There’s no sign of the boy anywhere, as if the events of last night had never even happened at all. The couch is completely spotless.

A bit  _ too  _ spotless, actually.

Dante rubs his eyes, blinking away his sleep and finds himself faced with the cleanest piece of furniture he’s owned in a long, long time. All of the empty pizza boxes and beer bottles and papers that had accumulated on the cushions over the many years of Dante’s residence have miraculously vanished. The blanket he’d draped over the kid last night is folded up in a neat square, stacked on top of neatly arranged pillows.

Huh. He hadn’t even remembered that his cushions were that shade of red. 

The couch stands out almost laughably against the rest of Dante’s apartment, which is its usual disaster zone. Dante really should get around to tidying up one of these days, but it’s just too much work, and he’d never found much of point in trying to restore order to something that would just end up in disarray again in a few days.

“Holy  _ shit,” _ Lady mutters from behind him. “I actually want to sit on your couch now.”

Trish echoes the sentiment, practically vaulting over the coffee table to settle herself on the cushions, rubbing at the material with a derisively amazed look on her face. She gives Dante an incredulous stare, a smirk twitching at the corners of her lips.

“So, what, you spent the entire night in here, cleaning your couch? Damn, you must have been wasted as hell. I don’t think sober Dante knows what cleaning even is.”

“Would explain his  _ complete absence _ from an event we expected him to show up to,” Lady hums thoughtfully, and, through some sort of horrifying telepathic link, they turn to glare at him in perfect unison.

Scary.

He holds up his hands in defense, his heart beating uncomfortably fast as his thoughts race, trying to figure out where the damn kid disappeared off to. Dante’s always been a deep sleeper, so it’s not much of a surprise that Nero apparently managed to excavate what must have been about thirty pounds of trash from his couch and vanish into the void without waking him up. But the fact that Nero evidently saw fit to clean up after Dante was equal parts weird, funny, and somewhat heart-warming. 

Dante isn’t too sure how he feels about it, but he knows he definitely has to find the kid again. Maybe treat him to dinner or something in thanks.

“I wasn’t drunk, I swear. You can check the cabinet if you want--it’s all there.”

After a long pause, Lady finally stalks over to his liquor cabinet, tugging open the door and examining its contents. Unless Nero broke in and drank some while Dante was asleep, the evidence should back up his claim.

“Damn. He really wasn’t.”

Trish and Lady exchange looks over his head, and Dante sighs, pulling out a chair from his kitchen table and collapsing in it. All he really wants to do is go back to bed, and maybe start looking for Nero afterward.

“You really just stayed in here by yourself all night? Could have given us a call. Or actually answered any of our calls.”

From Trish’s tone, Dante can tell they’d been pretty worried about him and he winces internally. He didn’t even know what time it was now, but given the fact that he’d passed out around four and his phone had been dead since at least nine, they must have been calling him for hours, maybe even in the morning while he’d slept. 

“Sorry. Phone was dead,” he offers lamely, his answer impressing exactly no one, but it’s the honest truth. “And I wasn’t alone. Had a friend over. He’s responsible for the couch, by the way.”

“Dante, you don’t  _ have  _ friends.”

Dante shoots a dry look at Lady, who meets his gaze evenly one hand on her hip. Clearly, neither of the women are content with backing down--Dante’s going to need to provide a little more detailed explanation.

“Okay, well..this is going to sound really weird, but I got lost on the way to the restaurant. And along the way, I found...this kid. He was cold and really soggy and overall just looked kind of sad, so I took him back to my place.”

He leaves out the minor little detail of Nero being a vampire and how Dante had cut open his own palm and let the kid lick his hand, figuring that Lady and Trish probably wouldn’t be too pleased with that tidbit of information. They were good people, and if they took the time to meet Nero, Dante’s pretty sure that they’d get along. 

The pair of hags always did have a soft spot for cute kids. But in their line of work, it’s usually ‘shoot first, ask questions later,’ which is pretty essential to their basic survival.

“And where is this imaginary friend of yours now? Not that I don’t appreciate what he’s done. Haven’t been able to see the color of your couch in years. You should call him back, have him do the rest of your apartment, too.”

Dante grimaces at Trish’s words. He wouldn’t even know where to start in his search for Nero. The kid made it pretty clear from last night’s run that if he didn’t want to be found, he probably wouldn’t be.

“Don’t think I can,” he mutters, more to himself than anything.

Lady bounces over to cuddle up next to her longtime girlfriend, the two of them making themselves very much at home on his formerly uninhabitable furniture. “Don’t tell me you scared him off, Dante.”

Dante stops at that, his thoughts turning over in his mind, because Lady is very much potentially correct, as much as Dante doesn’t want to believe it. Nero had definitely woken up much earlier than Dante had, and had found himself in a stranger’s home, wearing different clothes than he’d gone to sleep with. Exactly none of that was reassuring,  _ especially  _ if Nero had happened to catch of glimpse of Dante’s rather unsavory reaction to the whole blood-drinking debacle.

Hell,  _ Dante  _ doesn’t even trust Dante. No reason that a kid like Nero would, considering the guarded look in Nero’s eyes that had persisted up until Dante had fed the boy his blood.

“Nah,” he says, managing to temporarily shove aside his usual self-deprecating thoughts. “I told him you crazy witches were coming over. Even the thought of you two was horrifying enough to make him bolt.”

“If that’s what you have to tell yourself to keep back the tears, go ahead,” Trish snarks, laying her head back. “Still, I’m impressed, Dante. You didn’t drink at  _ all  _ last night?”

“Don’t have to sound  _ too  _ surprised,” he mutters, but the girls are right to be startled. Dante himself is still reeling from it, the novelty of actually being able to remember the night of his birthday.

Damn kid, getting in the way of his birthday plans. Not that that’s entirely a bad thing.

“So, what--are you gonna go looking for this boy? Seems like he made a pretty big impression on you if you were willing to actually put away the bottle for the whole night.”

Dante isn’t so sure that his sobriety status has as much to do with Nero as it does the fact that he simply hadn’t been in his own home for most of the night. But it’s definitely true that the boy’s left quite an impact on Dante. Maybe it’s because he saved Dante from actual death or maybe because Dante feels close to him after sharing his blood with him.

Either way, he can’t stop thinking about Nero. 

It’s like an itch crawling underneath his skin, one that he can’t scratch no matter how hard he tries. 

It would be so easy to write the kid off, to let him run away with Dante’s overly large sweatshirt still on him and never see him again, but his palm tingles with the phantom sting of the cut he’d made, and the more he stares at the healed, unmarked skin, the more and more sure he is that he needs to find the boy.

What he’ll do after that, he isn’t as sure about. 

“Don’t suppose that you two have got any tips on tracking down people?” Dante finally asks, arranging himself in his chair in a way that allows him to face Lady and Trish’s judgemental stares head on.

“Please,” Lady scoffs. “Who do you think you’re asking? What does the kid look like, anyway? Trish and I can find him in two days, tops.”

“Well,” Dante hums to himself, eyes clouding over as he loses himself in thought. He feels the strange tugging sensation somewhere in his gut again as Nero’s image flashes through his mind.

“His eyes are _really_ damn blue.”

* * *

 

 

As it turns out, two days later, Dante does  _ not  _ need to find Nero, because Nero finds him first.

Dante doesn’t know every one of his students personally, considering how many he has to teach every year. Out of everyone in his current class, he probably only knows one or two of their names, the rest lost underneath a blend of paperwork and labels. It’s a real bitch of a habit of his to not pay attention to these kids, especially when it comes back to bite him in the ass whenever he gets asked to write recommendation letters on complete strangers, but Dante can’t help it.

He’s a lazy person at heart and memorizing every name and face of one hundred and fifty students every year is not the way he ever wants to spend his leisure time.

But when he walks in on that Monday morning, he begins to think that maybe he should invest some time in looking into his students.

Because nestled happily in the very back of his lecture hall is Nero.

The kid looks wholly disinterested in his surroundings, his feet propped up on the seat in front of him, blue eyes idly flicking through the pages of Dante’s history textbook that he’s somehow acquired. Dante stares hard at the kid, but no matter how much he ogles at Nero, the boy never looks up, apparently content to leave Dante floundering in his complete confusion. He’s still wearing the sweatshirt that Dante gave him, even, and Dante doesn’t know whether Nero is insane, brave, or both.

He’s a  _ vampire,  _ and he’s sitting in broad daylight in Advanced History of the Human World with a hundred other human and likely extremely anti-vampire students. More than that, Nero is making a less than minimal amount of effort to hide himself, even as the paleness of his hair and skin draws looks from the students sitting around him. At the very least, his fangs are well hidden by his closed mouth, so he isn’t setting off too many alarms.

What the  _ fuck _ .

To say that Dante is distracted would be an understatement.

At this point, this is the second crappy lecture in a row that he’s given to his students, and he’s pretty guilty of wasting both their time and their tuition, but Dante literally, for the life of him, cannot tear his eyes away from Nero. There are a hundred different questions swarming around in his head, intrusive thoughts pressing into the rhythm of his daily activities, and, in all honesty, all Dante really wants to do is end his class as quickly as possible so he can talk to the kid.

He’s almost afraid that Nero will make a break for it as soon as he dismisses the lecture. The kid has already proven just how fast he is, and Dante doesn’t think he could catch up to him if he got a head start. Besides, the sight of a grown man chasing after a college-age looking boy was certain to raise some inquiries, none of them good.

Luckily for him, it seems like his desire to talk to the kid is mutual because Nero stays put where he is as the other students slowly file out, unmoving until the door slams shut behind the last straggler, the noise echoing in the suddenly too quiet room. 

Dante folds up his papers, tucking them into his folder, and clears his throat awkwardly, suddenly lost for words now that they’re actually alone. 

Nero doesn’t seem to react at all, turning another page in the book he seems so intent on reading, his expression completely neutral. The burden of starting the conversation is on Dante then, it seems. Perhaps he should start with the obvious.

“What--”

The air is suddenly knocked from his lungs as he’s slammed back into his own podium, the barely healed bruises on his back aching with renewed vengeance. Nero’s left hand is tangled in the front of Dante’s shirt, the other still loosely grasping the now closed history book, his eyes bright with simmering fury.

In less than the amount of time it had taken for Dante to  _ blink _ , Nero had somehow crossed the span of the entire hall, and now looked very ready to attack him.

“What the  _ fuck  _ did you do to me?” Nero hisses, and maybe it’s Dante’s imagination, but Nero’s eyes seem to turn lighter than normal, a nearly translucent blue that Dante can’t stop looking at, a very pretty, mesmerizing shade that flickers with the depth of Nero’s emotions. Dante thinks he can see years upon years of life within them, an ageless soul trapped behind a mortal face and the contrast is strikingly entrancing--

Nero shakes his own head, breaking off eye contact with Dante, and the haze in Dante’s mind suddenly lifts, the enchantment dispelled. The kid is biting at his lip in clear frustration, and his grip on Dante’s shirt tightens.

“Damn it--I can’t even  _ control  _ this shit. This is  _ your  _ fault, what did you  _ do?” _

Dante struggles to piece a coherent thought together, which is much easier now that Nero’s vampiric gaze is not trained directly upon him. 

“What do you mean, what did  _ I  _ do? I haven’t done anything, kid. You’re the one showing up at my workplace.”

“Don’t lie to me!” Nero snaps, before Dante can ask any of the many related questions he has about Nero’s presence here. “I should have known better than to trust you--that there was no way you were just feeding me your blood to be  _ nice _ . That’s not the way the world works, not for me.”

There’s a tremble in Nero’s voice, either from rage or fear, and Dante is suddenly struck with how terribly vulnerable he himself is in this position. All appearances aside, Nero had just reminded him that he was still very much a demonic creature, much stronger and faster than Dante’s human abilities could hope to match. Dante likes to think that Nero wouldn’t harm him, but if there was one thing that he’d learned from his beloved twin brother, it was that demons were wholly unpredictable in nature.

“Nero, I don’t get what you’re saying,” Dante says slowly, trying to diffuse the situation, keeping as still as possible. “I haven’t seen you in, what, two days? Sure don’t think I did anything to you in that time.”

A brief stab of worry wriggles its way into Dante’s too-fast heart, despite himself, and he peers down at Nero, trying to get a better look at the kid. Nero still won’t make eye contact with him, perhaps out of fear of accidentally triggering his hypnosis abilities again, but it’s clear enough to Dante that Nero is, behind the initial front of fury and intimidating that he’s trying to put up,  _ afraid _ . 

“Don’t tell me you don’t know,” Nero grits out through his clenched teeth. “You  _ bound  _ me to you, you asshole. You did--you did  _ something  _ when you gave me your blood, I don’t know what, but now I’m stuck with you!”

Dante’s heart jumps uncomfortably in his chest, coming to a sudden stop before picking up again, blood roaring in his ears. If what Nero is saying is in any way accurate, then it sure does sound like Dante’s somehow made a blood pact with this kid.

The irony of it all. Ten years of trying to forget Vergil’s crimes and his existence and here he is, standing at the other end of a deal with the devil, making contracts with demons.

Must run in the family or something.

“That...what do you mean, stuck?”

Nero gives him a half-second glare, before settling his gaze somewhere to the right of his head.

“These two days...before I found you again...I guess it hasn’t done much to you, but I physically can’t stay away. It’s like I’m chained to you, and if I go too far away, it…” Nero refuses to elaborate further, but Dante catches the grimace of pain twisting across his face and the shard of worry in the pit of his stomach sharpens.

He suddenly recalls how he’d felt when Nero had closed up the cut on Dante’s palm, the way something inside of him had twisted with a not wholly unpleasant sensation, something oddly warm trickling through his veins. He remembers how he’d been literally unable to resist taking the kid home, how his thoughts had swirled so obsessively around Nero for the entire weekend.

Shit. Maybe it  _ has  _ affected Dante after all.

“Kid, I swear--if we’ve actually made a contract--that was definitely not my intention.”

Nero continues to look suspicious, and Dante sighs, unable to suppress the urge to push back against Nero just a little. He isn’t very good at just taking shit lying down, after all.

“Look, you don’t seriously think I went out and got myself attacked in the hopes of finding some friendly vampire to contract with, do you? Even I’m not that stupid. And I’ve done a lot of dumb shit in my life.”

“Then why did this happen?” Nero demands, as if Dante somehow has the answers. The fingers tangled in Dante’s coat are starting to tremble, the fear of uncertainty creeping into the blue of Nero’s eyes. “Other vampires don’t end up  _ enslaved  _ to the humans they drink from! So it must be you.”

Enslaved?

It takes Dante a long moment to put the pieces together, to realize why Nero would attack him up front before he could even say anything, why Nero is so suddenly on the aggressive, why he’s so desperate for answers that he must realize Dante doesn’t have.

Nero is afraid of  _ him _ .

It makes sense, logically. Dante has a relatively fleshed out understanding of how these types of demon-human contracts work, due to being a primary witness to Vergil’s and because of his connections with Lady and Trish. These types of things are lifelong agreements, and generally, they tend to lean far more in favor of the human than the demon, hence why contracts were almost always forced on the latter.

Dante’s not too certain about the specifics of his newfound blood bond with Nero, but if it’s anything even remotely resembling the ones that Vergil had been in possession of...

No wonder Nero feels so unsafe around him.

But the thought still makes Dante vaguely ill, heart twisting painfully as he remembers the too-trusting way Nero had looked at him last night. The Nero of the present has his face angled away from Dante, his teeth digging into his bottom lip and his muscles tense to hide the tremble in them.

“Nero, hey,” he tries keeping his voice gentle as he slowly reaches out, curling his hand around Nero’s thin wrist. “I’m not going to do anything to you, I promise. If you’re really stuck with me--and I know that seems bad to you--but if it’s really like that, we’ll figure something out, okay? There must be a way to undo it.”

Nero actually  _ growls  _ at him, tearing his wrist away from Dante’s grasp, but also letting go of Dante’s shirt at the same time, and Dante feels like he can breathe easy again. The kid backs off of him, stalking back and forth on the stage, anger and confusion and uncertainty written all over his face. Nero wears his heart on his sleeve, whether he means to or not, and Dante can’t help but want to do something about it.

“Kid…”

“Shut. Up.” Nero’s grip on the textbook still in his hands tightens to the point where the spine  _ cracks _ and Dante instantly closes his mouth. 

Nero, somehow, seems just as surprised as Dante is, and looks down at his own hands for a long moment, before setting the book gently down on the floor. He runs a frustrated hand through his white hair, breathing deeply through his nose, and rounding on Dante again. 

“You’re right. There has to be a way to get rid of this. And I’m going to find it. In the meantime, I’m stuck staying with you. I’m guessing you won’t have as much of a problem with that since you literally took me home the first time we met.” 

Nero’s tone is aggressive, assertive, like he’s the one giving out the orders, but the bite in his voice can’t quite mask the hesitance in his eyes or the tremble in his words. Nero is hoping that Dante will agree with him without putting up a fight, that if he pushes and threatens Dante enough, Dante won’t resist him.

Because Nero isn’t in a position to push back if Dante chooses to do so.

Dante still has to wait a long moment before his brain catches up with what Nero’s saying and he holds his hands up in a placating sort of gesture, trying to keep his expression as neutral as possible.

“Uh--woah. This is...really sudden. I mean, I don’t have any objections to you staying over, kid. Just...can’t we talk about this first?”

The look Nero sends him is one of a cornered animal, guarded and wary and almost desperate. He stands still for a long moment, clenching and unclenching his fists in his uncertainty. But, if anything, the kid seems a bit more relaxed than before, a little less ready to fight now that Dante has verbally agreed to take him in.

“What is there to talk about?” he relents, finally leaving an opening in his walls for Dante to poke through.

There’s a lot for them to talk about, actually, and if Nero will let him, Dante wants to pull the kid aside somewhere private, maybe grab a coffee while he lets Nero’s temper cool off, and they can just sort things out. But he gets the feeling that Nero wouldn’t take to that too well.

Dante’s head is beginning to ache, clear signs of a migraine prickling behind his eyes. He really wants a drink, wants to lose himself in the warm haze that alcohol affords him and to be able to pretend that this is someone else’s problem.

Not that Nero himself is a problem, but their little contract definitely is. The last thing he wants is to be like Vergil, Vergil with his grand dreams and ambitions for power, putting more stock in his relationships with demons than in the one with his own twin brother.

“You’d be surprised,” is all Dante says, instead of any of the thoughts threatening to push their way out of his mind, and he stacks up his papers again, tucking them into his bag. “Come on, kid. We can’t hang around here for too much longer--there’s another class waiting to use this room after me.”

Dante begins to walk up the stairs of the hall without waiting for a reply, and he hears Nero mutter a complaint underneath his breath before trailing after him a second later. The kid’s footsteps are unnervingly light and quiet, and it feels like Dante’s being followed by a weightless ghost.

“So how’d you get in here, actually? This school is pretty well protected and warded against demonic creatures, after all. As most public places are,” Dante tries, both because he’s curious and because he doesn’t exactly like walking in stiff silence. 

“Getting in was easy. If I don’t want to be noticed, I won’t be.”

There’s a lot more hidden underneath that statement, something like bitter resentment, and Dante wonders if Nero actually wishes for the opposite, if he  _ wants  _ someone to pay attention to him.

“Didn’t know about the wards, though. Maybe they don’t work on me?” 

Now that is a bit more concerning--Dante will have to remind the faculty to check up on security measures, later.

“How’d you know I work here, though? Didn’t think I gave out too much personal information the first time we met.”

Nero is suddenly silent, and Dante chances a quick look at him, to see that the kid’s pale cheeks are dusted a light pink, his eyes trained on the ground in front of him. 

“You, um. You’re not hard to find,” Nero answers evasively, and Dante assumes that’s pretty much all he’s going to get until, after an even longer silence than the first, Nero resumes, his words mashing together in a hurried blur. “I, uh...sortoftrackedyoubyyoursmell.” 

Dante raises an eyebrow, turning his head fully to look at Nero, who absolutely refuses to meet his eyes, a smirk tugging at his lips despite the seriousness of the situation.

“Yeah? What do I smell like to you, kid?”

“Don’t even start!” Nero snaps, shoving his hands in his pockets and curling in on himself like he’s trying to actively shrink into nothingness. Too bad--with how easily Nero seems to blush, Dante’s pretty sure he could still find a way to fluster this kid, no matter how non-existent he tries to get. 

“It’s been driving me crazy ever since I drank your blood. I think it’s worse because of this... _ bond _ . I don’t know. Maybe I was supposed to kill you after I was done or something. Figures that would be the stupid way it works.”

Right. 

Dante suddenly stops, forcing Nero to twist around to avoid smacking into him.

“What the hell, old man? Don’t tell me you’re about to keel over and die right here.” 

Nero is right--death is a pretty simple solution to their little problem here. If one half of the parties involved dies, the contract is automatically dispelled. He’s known Vergil to be a master of this kind of thing, efficiently executing demons he no longer had a need for.

“Do you want me to?” Dante asks, trying to keep his tone light, but the possibility is very much there. Nero could probably kill him easily, now that his vampiric powers seem to be fully awakened, and Dante, for one, doesn’t know how hard he’d resist. 

He’s always been a lazy person, and fighting for his life is not an effort he’s so sure he wants to make, at this stage in his life. There’s not enough left for him to lose in stopping, and not enough for him to gain by continuing.

Nero’s fingers are suddenly at his shoulder, reaching up and tugging him around so that Dante is properly looking down at him. The kid looks equal parts confused and enraged, and his thankfully still blunt nails dig into Dante’s clothes.

“Are you fucking with me right now?” Nero’s voice is a low whisper, deadly soft, but strong enough to carry through. Dante thinks that it’s the first time he’s ever seen the kid really angry, a pure kind of rage that goes beyond his usual fiery explosions of temper.

“Don’t  _ ever  _ fucking ask me that, you asshole. Don’t you  _ dare  _ say shit like that so easily.”

Dante opens his mouth, tries to say something to defend himself, but nothing really comes to mind. It was a stupid thing of him to say, anyway, but he’s never had a very strong brain-to-mouth filter. Instead, he shrugs, as best he can with Nero’s hand still at his shoulder.

“Sorry. Bad joke,” he forces out, with a flippancy he doesn’t actually feel.

Nero looks at him for another too-long moment with those piercing blue eyes of his, before he finally pushes Dante away, hard enough to make Dante stumble back a few steps.

“You got a shit sense of humor,” Nero finally snaps. “You’re not going to die anytime soon--I’m not letting you run out of this that easily. Even if killing you gets rid of this stupid contract, this whole thing is your fault, anyway. I’m not letting you just get away from that!”

Dante blinks at Nero for a long moment, looking into those defiant blue eyes. It feels like Nero is making him a promise, of sorts, holding him to an oath on his own life. And maybe he’s right--Dante  _ does  _ have some sort of a responsibility to this kid, even if he’s still not sure how they ended up bonded like this, when clearly neither of them wanted to be contracted together.

At least until they figure out what’s going on and how to get rid of whatever is tying them together, Dante can’t just duck out on the kid.

“Yeah. Sorry. I’ll stick it out with you,” Dante swallows around the tightness in his throat, and Nero searches his face, before turning away, apparently satisfied with Dante’s response.

They don’t say anything more than that the rest of the way as Dante leads Nero to his private office, locking the door behind him and collapsing in his office chair. Nero gingerly sits at the very edge of the chair across, glancing around himself like he’ll have to be ready to get away and out of this room as quickly as possible.

“You’ll probably have to camp out here for a bit. I can’t leave work early, and even though you already managed to sneak past the campus guards, I don’t want them finding you and throwing you out,” Dante explains, rubbing his temples with his fingers as he tries to work through exactly how this is going to play out.

He’s lucky that he doesn’t have office hours today--he sure doesn’t need any of his nameless students wandering in and finding Nero hanging around his personal office without explanation. But if any of his colleagues come looking for him, they’re probably in trouble, and he can’t exactly send the kid away if what Nero’s told him is true and distance forces some sort of discomfort in the boy. 

Besides, something inside of him doesn’t want to separate himself from Nero, either. 

“So, what, I’m just gonna sit in here in silence? For how long?” Nero demands, clearly already getting antsy, and Dante has a bad feeling about this already. Dante can’t really blame him. If someone locked  _ him  _ up in a tiny room and told him to stay put, he probably wouldn’t be too happy, either.

Unwillingly, he suddenly thinks of Vergil, confined in a ten by ten cell, looking at the same view every day through the plexiglass window of his prison. Then he has to remind himself that Vergil is seeing a lot more than his hundreds of dead victims ever will, and forces himself to stop feeling anything about that.

He’s more than used up his monthly allotment of Vergil-related emotions, anyway.

Dante checks back into reality when Nero snaps his fingers in front of his face impatiently, and he recovers smoothly, a sly smile crossing his face.

“About five hours. It’ll be just like preschool, kid.”

“I’ve never gone to school,” Nero responds, blowing his bangs out of his face with an exasperated sigh and sinking down in his chair. “Whatever. I guess I can wait that long. You’d better not take your time, though.”

“I’d never make you wait.”

Briefly, Dante checks the time on his phone. He has about an hour to kill before he has to go teach his next class, so he might as well get to know his future housemate better. And catch up on some of the paperwork that’s been crawling up his ass.

“So, then, how’s your first day at school? Welcome to the system, kid.”

Nero shoots him an irritated look, no different from the norm, and Dante realizes that he’s never seen this kid smile even  _ once _ . It’s a bit unnatural, and more than a little sad, and Dante stores this information away in his head for later use. 

“Terrible. Too many of you humans running around. Your lecture was shitty as hell, too. Didn’t sound like you even knew what you were talking about. These kids’ parents actually  _ pay  _ you to teach them?”

There are many insults that Dante can ignore, but ones to his career are not amongst that extensive list. He sits up properly, leaning forward and pushing the kid’s feet on his desk aside, tugging his reading glasses out of their case and putting them on, searching around on his desk for leftover paperwork.

He finally unearths one of the stacks that was due about a day ago, but he’d managed to get a helpful extension on the deadline through some well-placed, rather unsubtle bribery. He grabs a pen out of the cup near his lamp and signs his name at the bottom of one of the forms, resting his head against his hand and glancing lazily up at Nero.

“They sure do. More money than you’ve ever seen in your life, I’m sure. And how would you know, anyway? Other than what you know from that book you were reading earlier. Which I wrote, by the way.” 

He can’t resist tacking on his credentials at the end, if only to witness the floored look on the kid’s face before he rapidly tries to cover it up with his usual annoyed expression. 

“Uh, because I was  _ there  _ for some of the events you were talking about? You might be a real dinosaur, but I’ve been around for a while.”

Right. 

It’s so easy for Dante to forget how old Nero actually is, because the kid usually acts the age he looks. Still, now that Nero has brought it up, Dante’s inner history nerd is undeniably interested. If what Nero says is true, he’s easily a literal goldmine of historical knowledge, a primary source left untapped and underappreciated. 

But Dante doesn’t want to think about Nero like that, like the kid’s some kind of book waiting to be read or is his newest source for his thesis.

“Well, since you seem to take such delight in pointing out my flaws, next time you can sit in and take notes,” Dante remarks dryly, but the offer that he’s extending is genuine. “Once we set you up with an ID and all that.”

Nero is strangely quiet at that, dropping his gaze, his blue eyes looking very far away, and Dante is suddenly struck with the thought of how Nero must feel, surrounded by thousands of other kids around his own biological age, going through the motions of their daily life, like he’s a normal human and not an undead vampire.

“You’re actually taking me back here with you?” Nero’s question is so quiet Dante almost misses it underneath the scratching of his pen. 

“Well, yeah. Sure can’t leave you in my apartment all day. You’d probably be bored, and you said we couldn’t go too far away from each other, right?”

Nero makes a face at the reminder, folding his arms across his chest and staring at the tips of his sneakers that are still lodged firmly on top of Dante’s desk. 

“I think that’s only for the first few days or something. Hopefully, the contract lets us get more independent later on.”

Dante shrugs, scribbling away at the sheet of paper underneath his pen. “Hope so. Still, you’re welcome wherever I’m welcome, kid. That’s the way it’s gotta be if we’re stuck in this situation, right?”

He’s being surprisingly generous to the kid, and he isn’t too sure why. Maybe because he feels like he still owes the boy for saving his life, but it feels like more than that. Dante’s usually not this open about his life or emotions with anyone, preferring to lock them up, whether physically or emotionally.

Like with Vergil’s letters. Or with everything related to his brother, actually.

Either way, he’s gone from that to essentially inviting this kid to follow him wherever he goes. Trish and Lady are right--Nero’s made a bigger impact on him than he’d thought.

Nero chews at his lip carefully, examining his fingernails with forced casualness.

“Thank you,” he says in an even softer voice, and Dante is wondering if he was even meant to hear it at all. Nero clears his throat, pushing himself up and taking his feet off of Dante’s desk, avoiding Dane’s paperwork in the process.

“And, uh...sorry.”

The kid’s definitely embarrassed now, running his fingers through his messy white hair, his gaze cast firmly down onto the wood of Dante’s desk.

“For...like, attacking you and all that. I didn’t know what kind of hold you’d have over me with the contract, and I didn’t want to risk it.”

Dante waves a hand, even as the bruises on his back sting in reminder. 

“Don’t worry about it, kid. We all have bad days.”

“You seem to have several, if the way you taught today is anything to go by.”

Ah, there’s the sassy Nero he knows.

“Hey,” Dante plucks another pen from the cup and flicks it at the kid, who yelps in surprise, superhuman reflexes catching it on instinct before Nero can even really register it.

Now that just wasn’t fair.

“Only reason I was teaching like crap today was ‘cause you gave me about fifty heart attacks making yourself at home in my class.”

“What, your dinosaur heart couldn’t keep up?” Nero retorts, a clear challenge stirring in his bright blue eyes. He flips the pen around in his hands, examining it idly before pocketing it.

Brat.

“That pen costs fifty cents,” Dante informs him sagely. “Don’t wait too long to start paying back your debts to me. I charge interest. My shit is important to me, kid.”

Nero looks at him, clearly unimpressed. “I’ve seen your apartment. Maybe if you spent less money on pizza, you could afford nicer pens. And maybe a cleaning lady. Though what poor person they’d have to conscript into  _ that  _ duty, I don’t know.”

“Maybe I’ll just get you to do it. You’ve already proven yourself with the couch. Thanks for that, by the way.”

“I didn’t do it for you--it was for my own peace of mind. Your apartment is disgusting. I don’t even know how you were living there for so long.”

Dante, hardened by years of Trish and Lady pestering him about the admittedly dismal state of his residence, merely rolls his eyes, unbothered by Nero’s pointed words. “Watch your words, kid. You’re about to be living in that disgusting apartment.”

Nero shakes his head in apparent disdain and doesn’t bother to respond, instead choosing to investigate the rest of Dante’s office with a critical eye. There isn’t much to look at, in all honesty. Dante’s not the best at decorating, nor does he usually spend a lot of time in his office outside of the mandated hours he’s required to be in for his students. The kid’s definitely going to be bored real quick.

Dante checks his phone again--he only has fifteen minutes left before he has to go, and a lot more paperwork left to do. Maybe he can kill two birds with one stone.

“Hey, kid. You want something to do while I’m out?”

Nero looks up at him, somewhat hesitantly, probably sensing the utter desperation in Dante’s tone. It’s a low blow, admittedly, but Dante is pretty willing to try anything to avoid getting out of extra work.

He slides the stack of already completed forms over to Nero, who frowns deeply down at the papers as if they’ve committed some great personal offense against him. Dante definitely understands his sentiment, feels it inside his very bones. There is nothing that Dante detests more in this world than paperwork.

“Mind sorting these out? Alphabetical order, by last name. Just shove them in the cabinet when you’re done.” 

Dante pulls open his abused-looking filing cabinet, which is marginally less disorganized than the rest of his office. It’s definitely seen better days, days which came before Dante inhabited this office.

“I’m not your servant.”

Nero doesn’t even twitch, mouth pressed into a thin line of irritation as he stares down the papers, then slowly moves his gaze up to Dante. Their eyes meet again, this time without Nero’s vampiric gaze active, but the effect that Nero’s eyes have on him is startling even without magic. 

His eyes are the only part of him that reflect his true age, and every time Dante looks into them, the more he realizes how little he actually knows about the boy sitting in front of him.

“Never said you were. You can ignore it if you want. Just giving you something to do if you’re really going crazy cooped up in here.”

“How thoughtful of you,” Nero’s voice drips with sarcasm, and Dante sighs. 

It was worth a shot, at least.

He folds his glasses up, replacing them in their case and stuffing his teaching materials into his bag. Nero watches him move about with those blue, blue eyes of his, arms still folded over his chest.

Indecision stops him in his tracks on the way out, and he hovers next to Nero for a long moment, long enough for the boy to twist his head towards him in confusion. Deciding to take the risk, Dante drops his hand onto Nero’s head, ruffling the soft locks of white hair between his fingers.

“Take care, kid.”

He’s out the door before he can see or hear Nero’s reaction, doesn’t know if he’s crossed a line he shouldn’t have or if he’s caused another minor Nero-explosion.

When he comes back, five hours later, to take Nero home, neither of them say a word about his very polished looking file cabinet, holding papers organized neatly in alphabetical order.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im SORRY...........NUMBER OF CHAPTERS HAS INCREASED AGAIN THE FIC JUST KEEPS GETTING LONGER HELP  
> Warning: this chapter is significantly less happy than the others we entering the dark(ish) ages  
> ty to all dn friendos for inspiration and support

It’s the second time he’s brought the kid over to his apartment, but this time, Nero is very much awake and aware, and is fully able to criticize Dante’s living situation.

The disgusted look on Nero’s face only deepens as Dante unlocks the door and pushes it open, flicking on the lights to reveal the truly dismal nature of his home. His apartment is the same as how he’d left it in the morning, and the couch that Nero had worked so hard to clean has reverted back to its natural state, courtesy of Dante’s weekend pizza binges. 

“Incredible,” Nero says dryly, pushing aside a pizza box with the toe of his sneakers as he files in after Dante. “You live here alone, don’t you? How does one person do all this?”

Dante shrugs, locking the door behind him. 

“I’m just special like that.”

Nero makes a face at him, already starting to rummage through the pile of trash on Dante’s couch, flattening the pizza boxes into cardboard rectangles and stacking them on top of each other. The sight only serves in making Dante hungry, and he tugs his phone out of his pocket, pulling up the three contacts he has: Lady, Trish, and Pizza. 

“What do you want for dinner? It’s going to be pizza no matter what you say, but I might as well ask.” 

“I don’t need to eat. I’m technically dead, so my metabolism doesn’t function anymore. It’s why I don’t give off any body heat, either,” Nero informs him flatly, not pausing in his task of making Dante’s couch an inhabitable area again. 

The kid has probably already correctly assumed that he’s going to be sleeping on the couch for the rest of his days here. While he does have a guest room, he’s never really bothered to buy a bed for said room, so unless Nero wants to sleep on the floor, there’s really only one option for him.

“More pizza for me, I guess. Still, you don’t, uh...you aren’t feeling  _ thirsty  _ or anything?”

The look Nero gives him at that is a little strange, the wariness creeping back into his blue irises.

“No. Don’t bring that up, anyway. It’s really fucking weird.”

Seems like Nero hasn’t quite gotten over his apparent aversion to bloodlust. It isn’t Dante’s place to pry, and he doesn’t exactly know much about vampire biology. But Nero certainly doesn’t look any worse for the wear, so he’ll choose to believe the kid for now. 

Dante holds up his hands in mock surrender, taking amusement in the way that the boy bristles, sharp eyes narrowed into a glare. 

“Sure, sure. I’m gonna go change--you do whatever makes you happy, kid.”

He doesn’t receive much of a response from Nero, not that he expected one in the first place, and runs a tired hand through his hair, heading into his bedroom. He’s in desperate need of a long shower, and maybe a shave. He hasn’t been taking very good care of himself in the recent days, mostly due to his birthday being his birthday and his subsequent slightly obsessive thoughts about Nero.

So maybe the shower that Dante takes is a bit too long, but he thinks that, after everything that’s happened, he’s owed some self-indulgence. 

When he emerges from his bedroom, freshly scrubbed and clean-shaven, Nero is laying face down on the ground, pinned down both by Trish’s knee on his back and Lady’s gun at his head. 

The door is slightly ajar, and Dante figures that Nero must have answered the door when the girls knocked. He’ll have to talk to the kid about that later--stranger danger didn’t quite seem to be a concept that he’d completely grasped.

“Get off of me, you bat!” Nero snaps, his face strangely pink for some reason as he squirms underneath Trish, who merely tightens her grip on his left wrist, slamming it harshly against the floor, keeping his right arm pinned against his back, twisted in a highly uncomfortable-looking position.

The crackle of Lady’s gun echoes through the air, and Nero barely manages to twist his head out of the way in time, reflexes actually faster than the bullet. He presses his cheek against the wooden floorboards, staring wide-eyed at the smoldering hole to the right of him.

“Woah, woah, woah!” Dante hurries to intercede before Lady can cause any more damage to either his property or his Nero. 

Wait--not  _ his  _ Nero.

“Put the claws away, ladies--he’s a friend.”

“A friend? Dante, he’s a  _ vampire _ . You know how they are. _ ” _ Trish says incredulously.

“Don’t call me one of them!”

With the kid’s hair-trigger temper successfully activated, Nero’s struggles underneath her double in intensity, and he almost succeeds in throwing her off until Trish, probably more out of instinct than anything, roughly slams him back down into the floor. Dante hears a very familiar yelp of pain, along with the sickening crack of what might be Nero’s spine, and the kid goes deathly still.

Before Dante can register what’s actually happening or what he’s even doing, he’s practically leapt over the couch, one hand wrapped around Trish’s wrist hard enough to bruise.

_ “Don’t touch him _ ,” he snarls at her, surprised at the strength of the protective fury that’s suddenly bubbled up inside of him. He’s not too sure where all this emotion has come from, and he’s not entirely sure how to deal with it. His heart is pounding too quickly in his chest, and it feels like his blood is on fire, burning through his veins and ringing in his ears.

Lady and Trish are staring at him with astonishment that equals his own, and he swallows hard, trying to push away the rage that’s clouding his mind as he tries to remind himself that Lady and Trish are his best friends, his  _ only  _ friends, and they only thought they were defending him from a vampire that was sitting in his home. 

What is  _ wrong  _ with him?

He can feel Lady and Trish’s gazes trained on him, burning a hole into the top of his head, and he inhales shakily. They must think he’s possessed or some shit like that, and he can’t have them wary of him too, not if he wants them to trust Nero.

“Sorry,” he mutters, letting go of Trish and sitting back on the floor. “But can you let the kid up? I swear he’ll play nice.”

Trish and Lady exchange wary looks, but eventually, Trish gets off of the kid, though neither of the women put their weapons away. Dante leans forward, kneeling next to the kid, who looks more than a little dazed. Nero still doesn’t move, despite the fact that his restraints are gone, and Dante feels a sharp sense of concern for the boy.

He reaches out, touching Nero’s shoulder as delicately as possible.

“Nero?” Dante asks gently, and after a long moment, Nero’s eyes refocus on his face. 

The kid’s expression eventually twists into a scowl, and Dante sighs out in relief. If Nero is aware enough to bitch at him, nonverbally or not, he’s probably okay. 

“Give me a minute,” Nero murmurs quietly, and there’s a stomach-turning crunching noise from Nero’s back. Dante glances over to the source of the sound, despite himself, just in time to watch Nero’s spine repair the fracture. 

Dante suddenly isn’t so hungry anymore. 

“So, Dante. Want to explain what a vampire is doing in your apartment?” Lady demands, her finger twitching over the trigger of her gun. Neither of the ladies looks especially pleased that Nero has healed, both of them ready to attack at a moment’s notice. 

“It’s a long story,” Dante rubs his hand over his face, wondering how to put this in the best light possible. “Remember when I got lost? I sort of...ran into trouble. You know how it is. Wandering around, got lost, phone died, was attacked by a vampire, the works.”

“You  _ what?” _

“But it’s all good!” Dante interrupts before their expressions can turn any more murderous. “The kid saved my ass.”

“And now he’s staying with you,” Lady says flatly, rubbing at her temples with a hand, lowering her gun. 

“Looks like it.”

The three of them stare at each other for a long moment, and Dante senses that the two of them would very much like to speak to Dante alone. Unfortunately, he’ll have to face his fate. 

Turning to Nero, who is slowly picking himself up off of the floor, Dante sighs out. “Hey, kid? Think you can give us a moment?”

Nero huffs out, fiddling with the sleeves of Dante’s sweatshirt. “Sure. Whatever. Come get me when you’re done with your little catch-up corner.”

The second that Nero disappears into the spare guest room, Lady and Trish round on him, their gazes absolutely furious. 

“Dante, what are you  _ doing? _ Maybe that  _ thing _ did help you out one time, but he’s still a vampire! The literal worst type of all the demons, and of course you choose to hang out with it.” 

Lady is clearly exasperated with him, and Dante feels a bit defensive on Nero’s part. The kid sure doesn’t deserve this level of suspicion. Or maybe Dante is just being too trusting, but he can’t help it—Nero has such an honest looking face and such ridiculously blue eyes. It’s hard to imagine him as anything other than what he’s shown to Dante. 

“Nero is different. I’m serious! You should have seen the kid. He was  _ bleeding out _ and he still refused to drink from me.”

_ “You fed him your blood?” _ Trish looks just about ready to slap him, which is no different from usual, but this time, Dante might deserve it. 

“Just from a cut on my hand,” Dante says lamely, as if that excellent justification makes the situation sound any better.

Trish and Lady sigh in unison, a technique that they’ve perfected over their long years of friendship with Dante.

“Dante. Do you know how vampires get created?” Lady asks patiently.

Dante wracks his brain for his admittedly limited knowledge on this topic, eventually producing a, “Uh. They die?”

“Well, yes. They do die. And then they choose to come back. But they all know what they’re getting into when they resurrect. They know what kind of creature they’ll be turning into, and they choose to do it anyway. And it’s not like any dead person can do it—how do you think you have to be feeling in order to happily give up your humanity? You might think you know that thing, but you  _ don’t _ , Dante.”

Logically, he knows everything that Trish is telling him is perfectly valid. Nero is  _ two thousand _ years old, and Dante has known him for less than two days of that lifetime. And he, more than anyone, should know how to be careful. He’s spent the first twenty years of his life putting his undying trust in a man with his own face, and the next ten years regretting it. He should know how easily appearances can deceive, how pretty words and smooth lies can cover mistakes and hide imperfections. 

But he’s also sick of it. 

He’s tired of having to close up his heart and guard himself, and, despite all of the rough edges in their current relationship, Nero is the best--or at least, the most interesting--thing that’s happened to him in a long time. Dante wants to follow the thread, chase after it and see where it goes, if only to make life a little more exciting again.

“Yeah. I don’t know the kid. But I got plenty of time to find out, don’t I?” Dante flips over his palm, tracing his fingers over the spot where the cut should be. The kid had healed him, despite finding absolutely no benefit in doing so. That had to mean something about Nero’s character, at least.

Trish and Lady look very ready to protest, but Dante shakes his head.

“Look, maybe just spend some time with him too. You might be surprised at how he makes you think. We’re having pizza--or at least I’m having pizza. Not sure what he’s going to do. Sit and watch, maybe. You guys are welcome to share.”

Pizza has a way of bringing people together, after all. It certainly brought Dante closer to his pizza delivery boy, who he makes certain to tip generously before taking his heavenly parcel in his hands.

Lady, Trish, and Nero are all seated around the kitchen table, resembling some sort of twisted parody of Dante’s normal life. Nero, for the most part, looks more uncomfortable than anything, fidgeting awkwardly in his seat and refusing to look anywhere near Trish and Lady’s direction. 

Lady’s arms are firmly crossed over her chest, her right hand resting none-too-casually on the gun at her hip, and Trish is pretending to pick lazily at her nails while scrutinizing Nero with a careful eye.

“Pizza’s here,” Dante says cheerfully, dumping the box in the middle of the table. 

Nero spares it a glance for half of a second before turning his eyes away once more. “I don’t need human food.”

“Don’t want it if you didn’t put olives on it,” Lady contributes, knowing very well that olives, right next to paperwork and Vergil, are one of his most detested items in the world. 

Trish happily takes a slice, too similar to Dante when it comes to logic regarding food. As long as it was free, it was definitely edible. It’s a motto that’s saved Dante hundreds of dollars over the course of his life.

It’s definitely not the most awkward dinner Dante’s ever had in his life. That honor is reserved for a particular date he had about five years ago, in which his one-night stand had casually revealed to him that she had sought him out solely on the basis of the fact that he resembled Vergil, whose mass killings had aroused her greatly.

But it’s certainly up there. Nero looks ready to bolt at any given moment, and Lady seems very prepared to put a silver bullet through his skull the moment he does.

“Sorry for snapping your spine,” Trish says conversationally, after a long moment of chewing in the silence. 

Nero jerks his head up like a startled rabbit, his eyes landing on Trish before what is definitely an embarrassed flush crosses his face. He casts his gaze back down to the table, rubbing nervously at his right arm.

“Don’t, uh...worry about it. I got better.”  

The kid’s behavior is a bit strange, to say in the least. One thing he’s discovered about Nero is that the boy blushes very easily, but, as no one had really yet to say anything, Dante couldn’t imagine what the kid was so freaked out about.

“You look pretty shifty there. Nero, was it?” 

Nero seems to have a much easier time looking at Lady, meeting her gaze evenly, even as the pink on his cheeks stubbornly remains. He nods stiffly, like he can’t quite trust himself to speak, his nervous habits growing increasingly prominent.

“Take some pizza, Lady. And you too, kid. I know you don’t need to eat, but that doesn’t mean you can’t, right?”

The boy looks very caught off guard, blinking in confusion at the open pizza box on the table, his eyes flickering hesitantly between the faces around him. He almost seems to shrink back as Lady finally sighs, reaching out and taking a slice for herself, but keeps his gaze on the food, something like longing entering his eyes.

Dante frowns as a sudden thought occurs to him, and he stops mid-chew, speaking slightly incomprehensibly around the pizza in his mouth. “Kid, you ever eaten a pizza before?”

The boy shoots him a glare, but the displeasure is little more than its usual coverup, a mask for Nero’s actual feelings on the matter, which is a pretty clear confirmation of Dante’s theory.

“I don’t bother with that shit. Never eaten human food at all. Not since I….well, why the fuck would I buy a pizza that I don’t have a use for anyway?”

“Don’t have a use for--? Kid, it’s  _ pizza! _ There’s  _ always  _ a use for it!”

Nero looks in no way convinced of pizza’s incredible benefits, and Dante, almost personally offended on behalf of his favorite food, leans forward, snatching up a slice and holding it closer to the boy’s face.

“Just try it, will you? I promise it’ll rock your whole world. Changes your perspective on life forever.”

“Is he always like this?” Nero asks Lady and Trish instead, and, to Dante’s surprise, their faces relax, apparently having warmed up to Nero, the three of them silently bonding over their favorite pastime of bullying Dante.

“Yes,” they answer almost in unison, and Dante suddenly feels like he’s made a mistake in allowing Nero and the girls to continue to meet.

Nero’s fingers press into the skin of his right arm a little harder, and he stares down at his arms for a long minute, before finally meeting Dante halfway and taking the slice of pizza from him. He holds it up delicately, inspecting it warily, like he’s handling some kind of dangerous animal that could bite him at any moment.

Blue eyes dart between the three gazes that are so clearly locked onto him, and Nero squirms underneath the attention, maybe feeling self-conscious.

“This isn’t a fucking circus, you know! I’m not gonna eat it with all three of you staring at me.” 

Lady and Trish shrug good-naturedly and return to their own meals, diving into idle conversation about something else between the two of them. Dante can tell that they’re still interested, but they’re being considerate enough to Nero to at least try and pretend to be looking away at the critical moment.

Dante, on the other hand, is much less refined in the area of etiquette than either of them. But he’s so damn curious about what Nero’s first time trying actual human food will be like. Besides, pizza is his favorite food, is undeniably the best food ever created in the history of the planet, and he can’t help but want to know what Nero thinks about it. Why Nero’s opinion matters so much to him at this stage, he still isn’t sure.

Nero doesn’t seem to mind so much when it’s just him looking, though, and he bends his head forward, taking a very tiny bite out of the pizza like he’s a rabbit nibbling at lettuce. His face twists as he slowly processes the flavor, chewing thoughtfully to himself and swallowing slowly. It nearly pains Dante to see a slice of pizza being eaten so slowly, but he supposes he can’t blame the kid.

“It’s...good,” Nero says at last, his pale cheeks flushing a faint pink as he takes another, much bigger bite from the rest of the slice, and Dante mentally high fives himself for a job well done. Another follower converted to the gospel of pizza.

_ “Just _ good?” Dante can’t help but prod, and the females at the table look at him with varying amounts of exasperation. “Hey, it never hurts to get little more detail, you know?”

Nero is starting to look a little defensive again, shifting underneath Dante’s stare. Lady must pick up on the kid’s discomfort, because she kicks at Dante’s ankle underneath the table, which, given her steel-toed boots, is much more painful than it should be.

“Dante was spontaneously generated out of the air, instead of being properly raised. It’s why he has no manners.”

“I’m not surprised.”

He probably should have expected that the kid wouldn’t take his side on this, but it doesn’t stop him from sulking as snatches up another piece of the pizza for himself, folding it in half like a taco and shoving nearly half of it into his mouth.

At least the others seem to be getting along a little better now, despite the rough start they’d had. Trish and Lady would never admit it, not even underneath the threat of death, but they’ve always had sort of a soft spot in them. One that includes lonely and stupid alcoholics and immortal nineteen-year-olds, apparently.

They even start making idle small talk with the kid, who, despite refusing to lay his eyes anywhere lower than their necks, seems to respond fairly well, opening himself up with even less hesitance than he’d had around Dante.

It’s almost kind of sad to watch, actually, how easily Nero responds to the smallest sign of friendliness, like the way a kicked puppy reacts to being gently pet for the first time. Dante tries not to dwell on the thoughts too hard, instead focusing on the present, where Nero is nibbling at the crust of his very first slice of pizza and Lady and Trish are starting to get that somewhat soft, warm look in their eyes and Dante feels actually at peace.

“Thanks for keeping the old bastard sober on his birthday, also,” Lady is saying when Dante tunes back into the conversation which, of course, is about him. He’s the only thing that the kid and the girls have in common so far, so he supposes he should be prepared for a whole lot more of this.

Nero’s gaze widens uncertainly, and Dante can tell that the kid is trying to subtly examine him out of the corner of his eye.

“Didn’t know it was your birthday. Congratulations on turning ninety, I guess.”

Dante actually laughs, which is not something he’d thought he’d ever be doing after a sentence involving the topic of his birthday, but it’s a little too easy for him to lose himself in Nero’s levity.

“I could be a hundred and I’d still look better than you do, kid.”

Nero makes a face at him, but is also attempting to finish off the last of the pizza crust at the same time, and the combination of the two actions results in him looking like some sort of chipmunk. A very cute chipmunk.

Dante has a very hard time forcing himself not to stare.

The kid ends up eating only that one slice, which is fine with Dante. He’s never been one to complain about getting more pizza for himself, and he isn’t about to start now. He makes quick work of the rest of the food, packing it away with his usual speed while Trish and Lady, having successfully checked up on his well-being and gotten their free food, prepare to leave.

All things considered, Dante’s little pizza party plans have been a relative success, and the three people he has in his life are getting along well.

Maybe not too well, given the way that Lady subtly approaches him before she and Trish are set to fully exit his apartment. She gives a surreptitious look at Nero, who is laying on the couch with his arm over his eyes, evidently tired out by the events of the day. Or maybe the kid was just always falling asleep all over the place.

“Dante.”

Lady presses a gun into his hand, sleek and silver-handled and Dante hopes he will never have to use it. 

“Be careful.”

Dante swallows the lump in his throat, the knot in his stomach tightening. Nero is harmless, hasn’t done anything to harm Dante other than knock him into his own podium, and is currently curled up on his couch like a sleepy kitten, trusting enough around Dante to have fallen asleep around him twice.

He should really be able to reciprocate that unwavering trust, really wishes he could, but he imagines Vergil, remembers everything he could have done to stop his brother and never did until it was too late, and he closes his fingers around the handle of the gun anyway, tucking it away in his pockets.

Just in case.

 

* * *

 

After that, they settle into a routine, of sorts.

Dante takes the kid to work with him every day, and Nero either sits in his lecture and takes notes or hides out in his office and helps Dante fix up his shit. The kid is a bit of a neat freak, as Dante has discovered--Nero’s practically transformed both his apartment and his office into organized areas that he barely recognizes. He definitely isn’t used to seeing what his own floor looks like without empty pizza boxes and trash to furnish it, and he feels more than a little alarmed upon seeing his books his office stacked up in alphabetical order.

Must be some sort of bizarre vampire magic.

Nero doesn’t open up much more, remaining reserved and quiet and mostly out of Dante’s way. He isn’t all that rude, sniping at Dante only when Dante pokes at him first, which is increasingly rare, because Nero has taken to boarding himself up inside of the guest room and refusing to come out. 

He isn’t sure what the kid is doing in there all day, since there’s literally nothing inside of that room, except for the conjoined bathroom. So either Nero is sitting against the wall and staring off into space for hours at a time, or...Dante can’t really think of anything else, actually. At least, not anything that a kid like Nero is likely to be doing.

Dante feels like they’ve lost whatever slow progress they’d been making towards getting along, as Nero’s behavior is growing increasingly restrained. He barely speaks more than a few words to Dante at a time, spending most of the time with his teeth clenched and his head turned away in another direction.

The most likely explanation is that Nero is simply avoiding him.

It’s more than a little concerning, if he’s honest with himself, but Dante still feels a little too awkward around Nero to try and ask the boy to come out. Despite their unique positions and experiences, Dante has still really only known the boy for about a week and a half at this point. There’s still distance between them, a gap that Dante can’t quite cross, and doesn’t know how to begin doing so.

He considers that it’s maybe something he’s done wrong, that he’s really fucked up or put his foot in his mouth as he usually tends to do, and he’s spent a couple of nights nursing a bottle or three of beer while mulling it over. Unfortunately, this line of logic, compounded with his alcohol-induced emotional state, has resulted only in him formulating an extensive list of his own faults. 

Inevitable, but not very productive to his cause.

But he can’t stop thinking about it. 

Nero was being fairly normal around him in the beginning, bantering back and forth with him, sitting with him at the kitchen table and watching him eat, getting a little closer to Lady and Trish every time they chose to drop by, and all of that just suddenly stopped. So it must be something that Dante has done wrong.

Maybe Dante just isn’t likable.

He’s laying in bed, pondering this very dilemma, when he looks over at the clock and realizes he’s supposed to be getting ready for work. Dante frowns, feeling oddly off balance for a minute before he realizes what’s missing.

Nero is generally a much earlier riser than he is, and can usually be heard quietly shuffling about in the main room, usually cleaning up whatever trash Dante has left around the apartment. But the entire place is oddly silent today, and Dante feels a sharp sense of foreboding as he pushes himself properly out of bed, hoping that the kid hasn’t run out on him again.

The first thing he notices is that his couch is empty, and then, after that, that the blankets and pillows are in somewhat of a disarray. Nero never leaves his couch messy, always bothering to fold up the blankets and restack the pillows, as useless as Dante finds the gesture of cleaning up something that will literally be undone on the same night.

On a sneaking suspicion, Dante glances to his right, where the door to his spare bedroom is firmly shut.

Nero probably wants to be alone.  _ Definitely  _ wants to be alone. And normally, Dante would let him be, but he can’t help but feel like something is wrong. Swallowing down his lingering hesitation, Dante knocks lightly at the door.

“Uh, hey, kid? You in there?”

He doesn’t get a response of any sort, but when he tries the handle, the door is locked. The bad feeling in Dante’s gut has solidified into full-blown worry as he digs around in his junk drawer for a paper clip, hastily unbending it into an impromptu lockpick of sorts. Not his finest work, but it’ll have to do.

The idea of having to pick the lock on his own door like some kind of criminal is not exactly appealing to him, but his worry for the kid overrides his own sensibilities, and he has the door open half a minute later. The room itself is empty, but the door to his bathroom is ajar.

Feeling very much like he’s the middle of a horror movie, Dante silently creeps over and pushes the door open. 

It’s not a pretty sight.

Nero is kneeling on the floor, one hand braced against the floor for balance, his other hand clutching at his chest as he coughs up white-gold liquid into the toilet. 

Dante is at his side in an instant, hands hovering uncertainly around Nero’s body. He doesn’t want to touch the kid, isn’t sure how the kid will  react if he does, so he only taps at the tile next to Nero to try and let him know that he’s there.

“Thought you said you couldn’t get sick,” Dante murmurs quietly, as Nero makes painful sounding dry heaves.

“I’m not... _ not _ sick,” Nero chokes out, pulling his head up with barely enough strength to glare at Dante through his sweat-soaked bangs. 

Dante leans over, pressing a hand against the kid’s forehead, and Nero’s blue eyes flutter shut as he unconsciously leans into the cool touch. Nero’s skin is usually fairly cold, which makes sense, seeing as how the kid is technically dead. But now the kid is  _ burning _ , warm enough to make Dante’s skin prickle uncomfortably with the contact.

“Yeah? Then what is this? You gonna try and tell me you’re fine? ‘Cause I’m not buying that shit.”

Nero shudders, jerking his head away and sticking it back into the toilet as his body expels more of that horrible gold substance, and Dante doesn’t know what the hell is going on. Who does he even call about a sick vampire? Sure can’t grab the doctor for this kind of thing.

“It’s…” the boy’s voice trails off, and Dante knows, without a doubt, he’s wondering how to best lie his way out of this one. 

He grips Nero’s shoulder, trying to turn the other to him once he’s certain that his body’s attacks on itself have stopped. 

“Nero. I know I haven’t known you for very long. But you’re living in my apartment, and spitting up the vampire equivalent of blood. You don’t think I should at least know the truth about what’s going on?”

Nero grits his teeth, and for one second, the blue in his eyes burns so brightly that he looks like his normal self again, but almost as quickly as it had come, the energy dissipates, and Nero goes limp, his arms trembling with the effort of holding himself up.

Seeing the fire go out of the kid is actually scarier than watching him puke up his guts in the middle of Dante’s guest bathroom.

“Fine. This vessel--my body, I mean--is rejecting me. Because I haven’t drank any blood since...the last time. It wasn’t a problem before, but now that I’ve actually gone and done it, I’m supposed to feed constantly.”

He casts his eyes downward, glaring hard the tiles of the floor. 

“I knew it was a fucking mistake to listen to you.”

Dante ignores that part, more surprised at the fact that there’s such an obvious solution to the problem at hand. He’s already rolling up the sleeve of his right arm when Nero suddenly lashes out, nearly knocking himself off balance with the effort of his movement, and grabs at his right arm.

“Don’t you  _ dare,” _ he hisses out. “I’m not drinking from you--I’m not taking blood from  _ anyone  _ ever again.”

Up close like this, Dante can see the obvious physical signs of illness on the kid. Nero even paler than normal, a washed out color that stands out against the dark circles of his eyes. Despite the relatively normal temperature of Dante’s apartment, there’s sweat beading at the boy’s temple, even as he shivers almost uncontrollably. Nero is certainly good at hiding himself and his symptoms from Dante; he's been fooling him all week. 

Or maybe it’s Dante’s fault for not noticing in the first place.

“Kid, why not? You look horrible. And it’s not gonna hurt me if I get another papercut or two for your sake.”

Nero inhales sharply through his clenched teeth, blinking hard against the light filtering through the bathroom window like his eyes are especially sensitive to it. 

“Just  _ shut up. _ I can deal with this. I haven’t needed anyone’s help for two thousand years, and I’m not about to start now, not with a shitty old man like you.”

Dante has to give him credit--he’s as stubborn as ever, even when he so clearly looks and feels like hell. He wouldn’t have expected any less from the kid, but it’s concerning all the same, especially when it seems like neither of them are very sure about how long this sickness of Nero’s is going to last. 

“Nero--” he tries again, but the kid pushes himself to his feet, slamming his hand into the wall to stabilize himself as he nearly tips back over again, his free hand pressed against his head. 

“It’s fucking  _ fine _ . It’ll get better on its own. Being sick fucking sucks, yeah, but it’ll pass.”

Dante holds his hands out, fully prepared to catch Nero and prevent him from smacking his face into the hard tiles, but after a long moment, Nero properly rights himself, flushing the toilet and stumbling past Dante out the bathroom.

“So fuck off,” he snarls, his voice raspy and weak, but as determined as ever, and Dante can’t do much more than watch him go.

As much as he’d like to stay home and watch over Nero, he’s late for work, and he’s fairly certain that Nero would throw him out of his own window if he tried to pull something like that. Despite the kid’s somewhat sweet nature underneath, he had a real temper when it came to accepting help, it seemed.

So, despite his extreme misgivings, he loads up his car, watching with no small amount of concern as Nero piles himself in, collapsing into the passenger seat and laying his arm over his eyes. Now that the kid doesn’t have to pretend to be healthy around him anymore, it looks like all the energy has gone out of the boy.

Dante drives as slowly as he possibly can, both because he doesn’t want to jolt Nero out of the fitful half-sleep he’s fallen into and because he really doesn’t want the kid to vomit all over his car. Even if he himself has admittedly already made quite the mess, with his papers and trash and the obligatory pizza boxes strewn about the floor and seats, he doesn’t really want to add any bodily fluids to the junk pile.

Nero is pretty in control of himself, though, at least a lot more than Dante thinks he would be, if their positions were switched, and they get to campus without any further incident, although they are about an hour late to  Dante’s first lecture.

“What do you want to do, kid?” Dante asks cautiously once they’re parked, gently shaking Nero awake.

Nero doesn’t even respond for a long moment until Dante’s shaking grows too insistent for him to ignore, and he finally opens his eyes with a soft groan, taking a too-long moment to focus his dazed blue gaze on Dante’s face.

“Do you want to stay in my office for today?”

After a pause, the boy slowly nods his head, and Dante sighs, retracting his hand and getting out. He opens up the passenger side for Nero as well, pulling out his teaching materials while Nero stumbles out, eyes squeezing shut against the bright of the sun, and Dante has absolutely  _ no  _ idea how the boy has managed to fool him into thinking he was perfectly alright for this long.

“How long has this been going on for?” he demands, his hands already darting towards Nero’s shoulders to support the boy before he can slam headfirst into the concrete.

He doesn’t think Nero will answer at first, as the boy’s only initial response is to rest his too-warm head against Dante’s chest, but eventually, he mumbles out, “Been feeling weird for a while now. But it only started getting bad around...Sunday, I guess.”

The timeframe definitely matches up with when Nero had started locking himself up in the guest room and avoiding Dante like the plague. But today is  _ Friday _ , which means Nero has been staggering around in his half-dead trance and emptying his stomach at any given opportunity for about five days now.

God. 

Dante is either extremely stupid, extremely unobservant, or maybe he was just too fucking drunk to pay attention to the fact that his housemate was puking his guts up in the room right next to his every night. Probably that last one. 

Literally,  _ fuck  _ him.

Nero has every right not to trust him.

Dante is a shitty human being and a shitty caretaker, and he can’t stop the self-destructive thoughts from swirling around in his mind as he practically drags Nero into his office, depositing the boy in his extra comfortable office chair. He wishes he had a blanket or something to cover the kid up with, especially with how hard Nero is shivering, but he’ll have to improvise for now.

His students are awfully surprised when he walks in, partially because he’s late, or maybe because Nero isn’t with him. His students have gotten used to the kid’s presence there, after all--they’ve been passing Nero off as his new TA. But most likely the shock is because his signature red leather coat is nowhere to be seen on his person, and is instead back in his office, draped over Nero’s trembling, half-conscious form.

“Sorry I’m late,” Dante gives a cursory apology, spreading his papers out in front of him without reading any of the words written on them. “I had a...personal emergency to take care of.”

He’s going to get fired at this rate. 

But Nero’s condition has driven all thoughts of teaching and history out of his brain, and he’s pretty certain his students can read the worry in his face, the distraction in his movements. He can hear the hushed murmuring amongst his class, probably as they discuss amongst themselves the topic of what the hell is up with their professor.

Not that Dante could really tell them--he hasn’t even figured it out himself.

He couldn’t be more relieved when the class that needs the room after him kicks them out, and he’s actually out the door before any of his students are in what must look like a strange turn of events.

When he bursts into his own office again in a flutter of papers and panic, Nero is sitting right where he left him, wearing Dante’s red coat wrapped tightly around him. He’s got his head buried in his folded arms on top of Dante’s desk, and Dante thinks he might still be asleep until the boy slowly looks up, peeking up at him through his bangs.

“You’re back already?” Nero murmurs, and Dante frowns. 

“How long did you think I was gone for?”

“Dunno...ten minutes?”

It’s been nearly two hours--Nero is losing track of time, which isn’t good at all. Dante moves forward, resting his hand against the boy’s exposed forehead. It feels warmer than ever, but Nero’s eyes actually look a little clearer than before.

“How do you feel?”

Nero scowls up at him, looking thoroughly miserable. 

“Fine. It’s okay. Feel a little better after that nap, I guess.”

Dante examines him more closely, but he doesn’t actually think Nero is lying to him or trying to hide something, for once. Even if his fever has probably gone up, overall, the kid looks a little less pale, and more alert. He isn’t trembling anymore, either, evidently properly comfortable in Dante’s coat.

Huh.

“What, you just magically get better after some sleep?”

Nero doesn’t answer him, a flush appearing on his cheeks that Dante is certain has nothing to do with his fever. He fidgets slightly in place, looking down at arms and picking at the too-long sleeves of Dante’s coat, his hands nearly covered by the ends of the cuffs. 

“My coat is magical, then?” Dante offers, which earns him a probably well-deserved glare.

“Not your coat,” Nero says tersely, clutching the fabric more tightly around himself. “Your scent. It’s...it’s your blood I’m supposed to be taking, so...this kind of helps.”

Dante manages to resist the temptation to ask Nero what he smells like again, but it’s a close thing. Instead, he swallows, running a hand through his tangled hair. He hadn’t had much time to get ready before he’d gone to find Nero in the bathroom, and it definitely shows.

“Alright, you can keep the coat then, kid. It’s not that cold out, anyway, so I probably won’t be needing it.”

Nero nods, then slumps forward again, like the effort of lifting his head up and speaking to Dante for longer than a few minutes has completely exhausted him. Dante decides to let him go back to sleep without further comment, knowing the kid will definitely need what little energy the nap will afford him for the trip back home.

But it’s almost painfully clear that his scent alone isn’t going to cure Nero.

The instant he brings Nero back to his home, the kid makes a beeline for his guest bathroom, probably overcome by his intense nausea once again. While he’s doing that, Dante calls Trish on his cellphone as he fills up a glass of water from the sink, sending out an emergency help request to the ladies.

There’s the sound of the toilet flushing, then Nero comes stumbling back into the main room, collapsing on the couch, and doesn’t move. Dante kneels next to him with the glass of water, nudging him slightly.

“Hey, kid. You should probably drink up. I know you don’t need to eat or drink under normal circumstances, but this is different. You’re losing a lot of fluids and a lot of energy.”

Nero makes some sort of feeble noise of agreement, and Dante cups the back of his head, helping push his upper half upwards so he can slowly trickle the water into Nero’s mouth. He’s really not too sure how much good he’s doing at all, but it’s really the only thing he can do.

As an afterthought, he goes into his own room, pulling off the blankets from his bed and covering Nero with them. If there’s something that has to be covered in his scent, it’s probably his blankets, and Nero seems to respond positively, mumbling softly and burying his face into the soft sheets.

Dante pulls up his kitchen chair closer to the couch so he can watch Nero and sinks into it, pressing his face into his hands.

There are really only two clear solutions here.

It’s evident that, no matter what Dante does to help Nero, it’s only a temporary solution to Nero’s sickness. So he has two options: he can either persuade Nero to drink his blood, or he can feed Nero his blood by force.

The first is not very likely to work, given the way their current relationship stands, and how stubborn Nero can be when he puts his mind to literally anything. The second will almost definitely destroy whatever trust Nero has built up in him forever, and any attempts at Dante trying to reach out to him afterward will be met with impossible resistance.

He doesn’t want that.

He’s a coward, for not wanting Nero to hate him, for being more willing to let Nero suffer than forcibly cure him, no matter what it costs Dante. But he’s always been a coward--he was one when he’d clung to the memory of who Vergil was and not who he’d become, and he is one now, for trying to forget about Vergil now that he’s finally seen what his brother is.

He needs a drink.

He craves it so desperately it almost hurts, but if there’s one thing that Dante is terrible at, it’s facing the past and present. He’s always been one to look towards what was ahead of him, to fix mistakes by simply moving past them, and, when he’s actually forced to look at the things that happened back then and the consequences that are happening now, he buries himself in alcohol so that he doesn’t have to.

But he can’t.

He can’t kick back and crack open a bottle and relax while Nero can barely manage to hold onto his own insides, while he shivers underneath two layers of blankets and Dante’s red coat. This kid is his responsibility, became his responsibility from the moment they’d accidentally made this damned blood pact, and Dante has to see it through to the end, sober and miserable.

A knock on his door interrupts his musings, and he opens it to let Trish and Lady in. 

They’ve brought a guest with them, this time, a dark-haired young man covered in tattoos, a cane in one hand, a book in the other, and a bird perched on his shoulder.

Dante slides his questioning gaze over to the ladies, who meet his stare evenly. He’d explained the situation to Trish over the phone, and he’s pretty sure she has the common sense to know that now is a fairly bad time for a meet-and-greet.

“This is V. He’s an expert on this shit, actually. Does a whole lot of research and all that. It’s the whole reason why he signed up to work with us," Lady explains, folding her arms over her chest.

He’s not really in the mood to let mysterious tattooed strangers into his apartment, much less let them look at Nero, but Dante definitely needs all the help he can get, so he wordlessly concedes, returning to his place by Nero’s side.

Nero’s blue eyes crack open, and he slowly examines each of the figures in the room with him, before tilting his head to look back at Dante.

“What the fuck--” Nero begins to demand, but Dante presses his hand against the kid’s head again, and he goes oddly quiet and relaxed underneath the touch.

“Interesting,” is all V says, watching them closely with a careful eye. It’s hard to tell what he’s thinking, but Dante suspects that he’s analyzing their interactions, examining their bond for something to compare his research to.

Trish and Lady look down at Nero with some measure of sympathy in their eyes. Over the week, they’d visited pretty much every day, and had grown reasonably closer to Nero in that time. The kid was a bit hard to resist, with his soft face and his fluffy hair falling into his wide, trusting eyes. 

Not even two of the most badass women in the world were immune to Nero’s “baby rabbit” aura, it seemed.

“So he won’t drink from you?” Lady finally asks, kneeling next to Nero and gently touching his arm.

He frowns, turning his head in her direction, eyes flicking wearily between the three new people at his bedside.

“It’s a real party up in here, isn’t it?” he coughs out, his entire body trembling with the effort of breathing. “Shitty old man tastes disgusting, anyway. I’m not having any of it.”

Nero rambles on for a few moments longer, before he trails off, energy completely spent, and is pulled back underneath the blanket of sleep once again. Once Dante is sure Nero is totally out of it, he takes his hand away, turning desperate eyes on Lady and Trish.

“I don’t know what to do. I can’t even take care of a sick plant--what do I do about a fucking  _ vampire?” _

V hums thoughtfully, tapping at a blank page of his book as he gazes at Nero. 

“You could always just wait. Once the boy gets weak enough, his instincts will take over, and he’ll drink from you, whether he means to or not. The vampiric soul within him wants him to survive by any means possible, even if he himself does not approve of those means.”

“Yeah, maybe, but that’s like…”

It seems so wrong to have Nero just give  into his own biology like that. The kid’s spent his entire undead lifetime fighting with it, and Dante doesn’t want his struggle to end here. He wants Nero awake and conscious enough to make the decision for himself.

“There is little other solution, unless you wish to trick him into drinking your blood. It will be difficult, however. Vampiric senses are sharp, even in times of fevered delusion.”

“I’m not going to do that,” Dante says firmly. “Just...tell me. Do you know how much worse it gets from here? Or what I’m supposed to expect?”

There’s a pause before V continues speaking, and he seems somewhat hesitant to deliver his news to Dante, which can’t be good.

“It’s...unclear. There hasn’t ever been a situation like this before. A vampire refusing to drink blood is practically unheard of, and...even when most vampires are deprived of blood, they do not fall ill like this. Is this boy...connected to you, somehow?”

Well, crap. Secret’s out.

Trish and Lady whip their heads towards him so fast that he swears he hears their necks crack with the force of the movement. He holds up his hands in surrender, even though he isn’t sure how much good the gesture will do him.

“Alright, yeah, fine. The kid and I have a blood pact or something like that. Don’t know how it happened--it was  _ not  _ intentional on either of our parts, I swear. Don’t look at either me or him like that, Trish. I promise you he was completely freaked out when he came to confront me about it.”

“How do you  _ accidentally bond with a demon?”  _ Trish demands, and V only leans forward, looking even more interested than before.

“Again, I don’t know! I gave him my blood, and then he fell asleep, so I took him home! There wasn’t any ominous chanting or pentagrams or whatever the hell else you do to bond with a demon!”

“Actually,” V cuts in smoothly before Lady can fire off her own personal retort. “None of that is necessary in vampiric bonding. Usually, vampires draw blood by force and drain their targets dry as to kill them afterward. You, on the other hand, apparently voluntarily offered the boy your blood, which he accepted, and partook in while leaving you alive. That alone was enough to create a temporary bond between the two of you. Then...you say that you took him home? In other words, you created a permanent fixture for him to return to--a nest, if you will. Thus solidifying the contract.”

Shit.

So it really is mostly Dante’s fault.

_ I knew it was a fucking mistake to listen to you. _

The kid is right--it really was. No one should ever listen to what Dante has to say ever again, because no matter what Dante does, he’s only ever going to royally screw shit up. He’d tried to help Vergil, and now his brother is in prison. He’d tried to help Nero, and now Nero is laying on his couch and getting sicker and sicker.

He caused this. So now, more than ever, he has to fix it.

“So what happens then? You still haven’t said.”

V is quiet for a long moment, before he bends his head slightly, his voice lowering in apparent sympathy.

“His condition will continue to worsen. The nausea, the fever, the chills, eventually hallucinations, perhaps.”

Dante swallows, keeping his gaze on Nero, who sleeps so fitfully underneath the covers. There’s still more to this story, he senses, more that Dante hasn’t heard yet. 

“And then?”

V stares down at his own tattoos, tracing the whorls of ink against his skin, circles in an intricate pattern.

“And then he’ll die.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hmmm bIG WARNING FOR THIS CHAPTER:  
> tw for moderate amounts of explicit violence/semi-gore/torture in the middle section, and a described semi-character death  
> i don't think it's tooooo bad but I don't wanna catch anyone unpleasantly off guard so  
> it a pretty emotion heavy chapter i feel so bucKLE UP...

Somehow, everything feels so much slower now that Dante knows that they’re on a time limit.

Nero’s life is an emptying hourglass with an invisible upper half, and the sand is slipping through Dante’s fingers faster than he can stand it. But the world around him feels like it’s stopped, feels like it’s just him and Nero, living out the moments to the count of each one of Nero’s shallow, pained breaths.

Trish and Lady shuffle around his apartment, fixing the area up, cleaning up the trash that Dante’s left around the place. Dante watches as they pack up his papers and straighten out the chairs at his table. Cleaning up after him is something they’ve never done before, not even in those first few months after Vergil had been locked away and Dante had spent his days unemployed and thoroughly drunk, forgetting to sleep or eat or function. 

Nero’s the only one who’s ever bothered to follow him, picking up the pieces that he’s left behind.

V, having delivered his news, looks a bit lost, like he doesn’t quite know what to do, fingers flicking idly through the pages of his book. Looks like everyone is trying to do something to keep their hands and minds busy--the topic of death isn’t an easy one for anybody to dwell on, after all.

“I’ll order pizza for you, Dante,” Lady says, somewhere behind him, her voice feeling like it’s come from the other end of a tunnel, and Dante thinks that he might nod in response or make some sort of noise of assent, because she’s pulling her phone out of her pocket before he can fully register what’s happening.

It’s not important.

What  _ is  _ important is Nero, who hasn’t moved or spoken since V’s proclamation, and is still laying on the couch with his eyes closed, looking small and fragile underneath the layers of blankets. 

Before Dante can stop himself, or remind himself that he shouldn’t be doing anything that could possibly wake the kid up, he’s already reaching out, fingers slipping underneath the blanket to rest against Nero’s chest. There isn’t a heartbeat there, but underneath the boy’s pale skin, there’s golden blood running through his veins and Dante can feel the faint rise and fall of Nero’s chest through his labored breathing.

Even if his body is undead, Nero is alive.

The fire that Nero is burns so brightly, and Dante thinks it’s a shame for it to go to waste like this, extinguished because of a stupid mistake that Dante made, a line that he crossed because of his own ignorance.

“Hey, Dante?” 

Trish’s voice tears Dante’s gaze away from Nero’s face, and he looks up to see the devil hunter looking at him with the softest, most sympathetic expression he’s ever seen her level at him before. Her eyes flick between him and kid, and when she sighs out, Dante gets the impression that she knows something that he doesn’t.

“What?” He asks, clearing his throat when he realizes how hoarse it sounds, his emotions clogging up both his mind and his voice.

Trish is silent for a long moment, face twisted into thought as she seems to struggle to settle upon exactly the right words to say. Finally, she stalks over, long legs taking purposeful strides, and drops a slender hand onto his shoulder. 

She’s not a very physically affectionate person by any means, at least, not with Dante. He’s seen her and Lady, pressed together in a close, intimate moment, but her relationship with Dante has always been rooted in concerned sarcasm and well-meaning jibes. Dante must look really bad off if Trish is doing this with him.

But he doesn’t think he is--he doesn’t feel like anything, honestly. There’s a thick layer of ice packed away in his chest, and it’s just numb and empty all over. 

“Don’t blame yourself if you can’t convince him,” is what she finally says, and he doesn’t look at her, instead staring down at the knuckles of his own hands, the skin there already rough and scarred from long ago. 

“From what I know about Nero...and from what I definitely know about you, it might not happen. He might die. And you might have to let him go. But it won’t be your fault.”

She doesn’t get it. She doesn’t understand the implications of this--it’s no coincidence that Nero has been living for two thousand years, surviving perfectly well on his own, and has only come into mortal danger now that he’s met Dante. 

He shouldn’t have pushed for Nero to drink his blood back then, and he  _ should  _ push for Nero to drink his blood now, but Dante has never been very good at doing what he was supposed to do. And now Nero will die because of it.

But he doesn’t know how to articulate any of this to Trish or Lady or the new guy in a way that any of them will understand, so instead, he just exhales, slowly and roughly, keeping his gaze trained on the faded scrapes that pepper his skin.

“Guess so,” is all he can manage.

He can feel the hesitance in Trish’s fingers, can sense how reluctant she is to just leave him, but maybe she, like Dante, is afraid of opening a door that holds something that she might not be able to handle. So she goes back to join Lady’s side, and the two of them bend their heads together and turn away from him, murmuring quietly amongst themselves.

Once or twice, he thinks they might be looking at him. They’re definitely looking at Nero, though, sympathy and pity in their eyes, feelings they probably never thought they’d be having for a vampire. But Nero is exceptionally good at inspiring feelings in others, it would seem.

Eventually, after the pizza has arrived and the time has gone well past midnight, lost in a blur that Dante has spent sitting motionless in the hard wooden chair for, the others in his home make their exit.

“Remember to eat something, Dante,” Lady, the last out the door reminds him. 

He forgets to respond, or maybe he doesn’t, but whatever he does is good enough for the girls, because the door closes quietly behind them a moment later, leaving Dante alone with a dying nineteen-year-old and an impossible problem.

“Nero,” he says softly, testing the waters.

Dante is a coward who leaves things up to chance. If the kid happens to be sleeping lightly enough to hear him and wake up, then he’ll be forced to have this conversation with Nero. If not, then Dante can justify his cowardice to himself and slink back to bed and pretend like he can sleep peacefully while Nero struggles to breathe on his couch.

He isn’t sure whether or not he’s relieved when, after a moment, Nero’s cloudy blue eyes slide open and he blinks slowly at Dante, brow furrowing as he struggles to focus in on his face.

“...Dante?” Nero asks, and his voice sounds fragile, like it might break if Nero tries to raise it any further.

Dante lays his hand on Nero’s forehead, feeling the worsening heat from a kid who shouldn’t even have a body temperature to begin with. 

“Yeah. It’s me.”

He forces himself to swallow past the dryness in his throat, trying to summon words out of the absolute nothing that he feels within himself. 

“We got a lot to talk about, kid. And you probably aren’t going to like it.”

Nero blinks at him sleepily, clearly waiting for him to go on, baby blue eyes filled with severely misplaced trust. Dante has to make this quick--he doesn’t want to take up too much of Nero’s energy, nor does he know how much energy Nero even has left to spare. 

“Lady and Trish’s friend looked you over. His name’s V, in case you missed it. Long story short...he said it’s pretty likely that you’ll die if you don’t get some blood in you soon.”

The kid continues to stare at him, with no other reaction than to let out a tiny sigh, and it takes a long moment for Dante to process how completely unsurprised by this turn of events Nero seems to be. 

“...but you already knew that, didn’t you?”

He knows it to be true as soon as the words leave his mouth. 

Nero knew. 

Nero had known all along he was going to die if he didn’t drink from Dante, and he’d still refused to do it. He’d locked himself in Dante’s guest bathroom and puked his guts up and had looked Dante in the eye and told him that the illness would pass. That he’d get better.

He’d been planning to leave all along, and he’d still sat at Dante’s kitchen table and eaten his first slice of pizza, had made tentative friends with Dante’s friends, had wormed his way into Dante’s locked heart. He’d made Dante  _ feel  _ something for him, whatever it was, and he was still fine with dying.

And Dante had looked into his soft face and bright blue eyes and had chosen to believe him, because he’d thought of Vergil and the way his brother still had a permanent place in his life after ten years of not seeing him, because he was sick of living his life loving only the same three people day after day.

The painful cold he feels in his chest is starting to fade, an unpleasant heat shocking his system. He digs his nails painfully into his thigh, muscles tensing with the feeling as he stares hard at Nero, who doesn’t respond at the accusation. 

The kid turns his head away, fluffy white locks brushing against the pillow and, before he can stop himself, Dante is out of his chair, his hand locking in a firm grip around Nero’s shoulder and turning the kid back towards him.

Nero jerks in surprise at the touch, looking up at Dante, wide-eyed, as the older man looms over him, and, in one swift movement, Dante shoves up the sleeve of his right arm. 

“Drink,” Dante commands, his voice deeper and harsher than he means to make it, and a low, faint panic explodes in his stomach, desperation sinking its icy claws into his chest. 

The kid shrinks away from him, a hand flying towards Dante’s arm still on his shoulder, and he feels Nero’s nails weakly scrabbling against the skin of his forearm as he tries to pry himself away from Dante’s grip. Nero can see where this is going, can see what Dante means to try and do, and despite the glint of fear he can see in Nero’s eyes, Dante can’t make himself stop.

He’s so sick of it. 

He’s sick of the people in his life leaving him--his parents had left him alone with Vergil, then he’d gone and royally screwed that relationship up. Any of the friends he’d had outside of Lady and Trish had slipped away in the ten years while Dante was drinking himself into brainless oblivion. His students think he’s a crap teacher, his colleagues think he’s a disorganized nutcase.

The people in his life are always leaving, and it is always,  _ always  _ entirely his own fault.

“I don’t want to- _ -I’m not going to! _ ” Nero hisses against him, successfully twisting away from Dante’s grasp and sitting up, pressing one hand to his head at the dizzying rush that the sudden movement must give him. 

Dante takes the opportunity to push Nero back into the cushions, his advantage in size easily overpowering the kid now that Nero’s vampiric strength has been almost completely sapped. 

“Why the fuck not?” Dante demands, one of his thick forearms bearing down on Nero and preventing the kid from squirming away while his other hand digs around in his pocket for his knife. 

He wasn’t willing to force Nero to drink his blood before, back when he’d thought Nero was just going to be sick. But now, the threat of death hangs heavily over their heads, and Dante can’t let it happen. He can’t let Nero die, because he selfishly, terribly cannot stand for it to be his fault again.

“You know why!” Nero snaps, his struggles growing more desperate, and Dante growls in frustration, pressing harder against him and finally fishing out his knife with the other. He flicks the blade open, his stomach twisting into knots with what he’s about to do.

Nero’s gaze widens at the sight of the blade, and the look that he gives Dante is nothing short of pure betrayal, mixed in with fear. Dante feels  _ horrible _ , feels like he’s drowning and there’s nothing to pull him out, but he has to do this. 

It can’t be his fault. 

_ It can’t be his fault. _

“I’m serious, you shitty old man--fuck off!”

Dante feels his temper and his control quickly spiraling out of his hands, like he’s a frayed rope that’s about to snap. But he pauses in his movements anyway, glaring down at Nero. 

“You really want to die this badly, kid?” 

Nero’s eyes cloud over with rage so quickly that Dante is too surprised to see the kick that lodges itself into his abdomen coming, and, before he can process what’s happening, Nero has him pinned to the floor, a fistful of his shirt gripped tightly in both of his hands.

What little color Nero had regained from his nap on the couch is completely gone, and the paleness of his skin contrasts sharply with the burning bright blue of his furious eyes. His teeth are clenched, his fangs bared fully at him, even as his body so obviously trembles with exhaustion.

_ “Never _ fucking say that to me again,” Nero snarls out in that same too-fragile voice, his voice cracking like it’s about to break, and it cuts Dante more deeply than anything. He wishes that Nero would yell at him, call him names, punch him in the face--anything but this.

“How  _ dare  _ you fucking tell me that I want any of this?” 

Dante feels his stomach clench, anger that he didn’t realize he had bubbling to the surface.

“Well, what the hell else am I supposed the think? The solution is so fucking obvious--you just have to drink my blood, and I’m  _ willingly offering _ it to you. But you’d rather just die, and it’s--!”

_ “I don’t want to die!” _ Nero finally forces his voice louder, wincing as it stings his already abused throat. The kid’s blue eyes are suspiciously shiny, whether from tears of pain or emotion, and Dante’s heart stutters in its chest.

He’s the worst person he knows.

“Nero…” he starts, trying to reach upwards, and Nero releases his grip on Dante’s shirt, wavering unsteadily.

The sudden burst of energy leaves Nero as soon as it had come, and he collapses against Dante, his head dropping against Dante’s chest. Dante can feel a wetness through the fabric of his shirt, and he looks down at Nero as best as he can with the kid still on top of him.

“I don’t want to die,” Nero repeats, this time in a whisper, barely loud enough for Dante’s ears to pick up. 

“But I don’t...want to live like this, either. It’s not gonna be a one-time thing, you know. If I drink from you now, I’ll have to keep doing it, maybe every day, for as long as we’re bonded. And then...even when we’re not, I’ll have to keep drinking in general. Maybe I won’t get sick like this, but I’ll still be  _ hungry.” _

Nero looks up, then, and meets Dante’s shocked gaze with a such a lost, painful look that it twists something painfully in Dante’s chest.

“I don’t know what to do.”

The way Nero is looking at him reminds him of his students, actually--they look at him as if he has all of the answers, as if he can solve their problems with a few words, and Dante doesn’t even know where to start with Nero. The kid’s hurt runs so deep, more than Dante will probably ever know.

But Dante can try.

He lets out a slow exhale, reaching out and carding his fingers through Nero’s already tousled hair, the motion seeming to relax the boy a bit. After a bit, he taps gently at Nero’s head to try and get the kid’s attention again.

“Hey, Nero,” he says, and he’s relieved that his voice has lost that horrible harshness to it. “Mind letting me up? So we can talk without me having to break my neck.”

With the fight gone out of the boy, Dante could very easily push him off on his own, and Nero certainly seems to realize that. The fact that Dante doesn’t, that he’s waiting for Nero to make the first move softens the boy’s gaze, and he swipes quickly at his eyes with his sleeve before shifting off of Dante, collapsing against the couch for support.

Dante sits up slowly, wincing as the bruise that now decorates his abdomen makes itself known. Sick or not, Nero sure could hit hard when he wanted to. He exhales again, then adjusts his position so he’s sitting next to Nero, and, a second later, he feels Nero’s head slide against his shoulder as the kid leans against him.

He looks down at the boy as he carefully formulates what he wants to say, clearing his throat roughly.

“So...that really got out of hand. Sorry about that, kid.”

Nero gives a watery sounding laugh, and runs his sleeves over his eyes again, sniffling lightly. 

“You better be, grandpa. Hope I didn’t break any of your arthritis-bones with that kick.”

Dante hears Nero’s hidden apology for what it is, and he chuckles lightly in response, noting the way that Nero leans even further into him, peeking up at him through his long bangs, obvious concern written over his face. 

Dante will have to inspect the bruise later, when he’s alone, but he’s fairly certain that he’ll be alright.

“Nah. I’m a big guy. Little love tap like that can’t hurt me.”

“There definitely wasn’t any love in it.”

“Oh, sure. You keep telling yourself that. But I’m irresistible. You’ll fall for my charms eventually.”

Nero snorts, lifting his head off of Dante’s shoulder and twisting to properly look at him. “Yeah, you keep on dreaming. I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you, though. You don’t have any charms--you’re living proof that the dinosaurs haven’t gone extinct yet.”

Dante nudges him lightly in response, but keeps his gaze sharp as he looks over Nero, who seems to be doing just a little better with the addition of the physical contact. They sit in comfortable silence for a few more minutes, with Nero clearly trying his hardest not to fall asleep on Dante.

“Look, Nero...I can’t say that I know what you should do, either. I know that  _ I _ don’t want a kid like you to end up dead. But I’ll respect your decision. It’s your choice in the end, and sometimes, we gotta make the hard ones, right?”

Nero wraps his arms around himself, and Dante vaguely registers that Nero is still wearing his coat.

“I...guess so.”

The response is short and pretty vague, but Nero is tired, so Dante decides to let it go. 

“Well, you need a hand, kid? Or were you planning to spend the rest of the night on the floor?”

“Uh, not really--”

Nero’s sentence ends with a yelp of surprise as Dante smoothly scoops him up in his arms, and deposits him gently back down on the couch. Color floods Nero’s pale cheeks and he combs his fingers through his long bangs, avoiding Dante’s gaze.

“You weren’t supposed to do  _ that _ ,” Nero protests, but there’s hardly any heat behind the words, and Dante suspects that Nero needed the assistance a lot more than he was willing to let on.

Dante flashes the kid a grin, reaching over and ruffling fluffy white locks.

“Didn’t you know? I’ve never been very good at doing what I’m supposed to do.”

He covers Nero back up with the blanket, tells the kid to call for him if he needs anything, and heads off to his own bedroom. It’s nearly three in the morning by now, and, with his body having thoroughly burned through the adrenaline in his blood, Dante’s body feels heavy with fatigue.

Before he turns out the lights to the main room, Nero shifts slightly on the couch and mumbles out a soft, “Thanks, Dante.”

Dante stands still for a long moment, hand still paused over the light switch.

“Good night, Nero.”

He flicks the switch and disappears into his own room, shutting the door behind him and pressing his back to the wall. Dante closes his eyes, glad that Nero can’t see him in this moment of weakness.

Nero has nothing to be grateful to him for.

 

* * *

Over the weekend, Nero gets much, much worse, as per V’s dire prediction.

Saturday is filled with the sound of Nero’s pained coughing and strangled attempts to breathe through the violent spasms of his body. The kid rapidly alternates between being too cold and too hot and spends most of the time that he’s not fitfully asleep dragging himself back and forth between the couch and the bathroom.

Dante doesn’t sleep at all that night, sitting on the floor with his head pressed against the side of the couch, listening to Nero’s breathing, almost praying that each one will be his last, because watching the kid suffer like this is actually worse than imagining Nero dead. 

By Sunday night, Nero has completely lost the ability to sit up at all, much less get off of the couch. Dante can’t eat or sleep or think, because no matter how many times he reminds himself that he has to respect Nero’s decision, he can’t justify to himself the fact that he’s doing  _ absolutely fucking nothing  _ while this kid slowly loses his life in Dante’s living room.

Nero is so obviously at the end of his life, his condition having deteriorated too far for it to possibly be anything else, and Dante doesn’t want to be here, would rather be doing anything else to distract himself, but he can’t. He can’t leave Nero alone, and he can’t bring himself to separate himself from the boy.

So instead he’s stuck, fated to sit and stare at Nero while he shifts uneasily underneath the blankets, murmuring incoherently in his state of semi-consciousness. He does what he can to make Nero comfortable, changing the kid’s clothes and helping prop him up on pillows whenever he gets Nero to drink some water. He isn’t sure if Nero is aware of it, but the boy has thus far resisted all of Dante’s attempts to pry his red coat away from his hands, and Dante, despite missing the feel of his coat around himself very much, doesn’t have the heart to rip away the one thing that seems to give Nero comfort. 

Dante has been rereading the same line on one of the pages of his paperwork for the past ten minutes before he realizes that Nero is watching him, his eyes half-open and fogged over. It’s surprising to see the kid awake longer than a few minutes now, and Dante frowns, capping his pen and shifting towards the boy.

It takes an even longer moment for Dante to figure out that, even though Nero’s gaze is on him, the kid isn’t seeing him at all.

Nero’s brow furrows, and his body twists underneath the covers, showing more signs of movement than Dante has seen from the boy in the past twenty-four hours. An uneasy chill quickly settles over Dante, crawling up his spine with a severely unpleasant situation, and he swallows hard, trying to force away his anxiety.

“Kid? You...you there?” he asks warily and waves his hand in front of Nero’s face.

He doesn’t get a response--Nero’s eyes don’t even follow the movement of Dante’s hand, and the dull uneasiness turns into a sharp stab of fear as Dante wildly, blindly thinks that this is it---this is where Nero dies.

The thought overwhelms Dante more harshly than he’d thought it would, especially since he’s spent the past entire day awake and preparing himself for this moment. But it still hurts, still feels like he’s been punched in the gut and can’t catch his breath, and he runs a hand through his own hair, trying to inhale deeply, because  _ what the fuck else is he supposed to do? _

Nero is still mumbling quietly to himself, incoherent words that Dante can’t really make sense of, but he thinks that one or two of the words could maybe be a name. Then the boy’s hazy blue eyes slip closed and Dante thinks that he’s maybe gone back to sleep and Dante will go back to having to play the waiting game when the kid’s entire body very suddenly seizes up.

The vampire’s back arches so sharply that Dante’s surprised that his spine doesn’t snap again from the whiplash of the motion, and, maybe Dante’s sleep-deprived brain is playing tricks on him, but he thinks that the nails on Nero’s left hand are getting sharper, turning more claw-like.

Half a second later, he knows it’s not a product of his mind, because Nero’s very real, very deadly claws are tearing into his own throat, leaving jagged scratch marks against pale skin, thick golden fluid leaking from the lacerations.

“Nero, what--? Hey, hey kid, stop it.”

Dante is on his feet in an instant, unsure of what he’s even trying to do or what’s happening, but he has to do  _ something _ , can’t just sit by idly while Nero unconsciously tears his own self to pieces.

Nero doesn’t seem to hear him, is lost in whatever he thinks he’s seeing and feeling, and when his eyes crack open again, Dante can only see the whites of them, as they’ve rolled into the back of Nero’s head. He convulses again, harder this time, his muscles cramping up and his nails digging deeper into his own skin and Dante, nearly blind with desperation, reaches out to grab the kid.

The instant his fingers close around Nero’s wrist, the entire world twists around him, and he feels like the floor has been ripped out from underneath his feet, like he’s somehow fallen out of his own body. Physically, his body is rooted to the spot--he’s still bent over Nero, one of his hands at the boy’s wrist, but Dante doesn’t feel very attached to his body anymore. 

He feels heat and fire and something bitter and terrible, like the taste of burning ash and bile, rises in the back of his throat, and he shuts his eyes against the sensation, and when he opens them again---

He’s lying face down on the ground, writhing in pain underneath a heavy pressure on top of his back. The grass and dirt underneath him is charred black, decorated with streaks of red, and Dante can’t figure out why until his gaze shifts slowly over to the right, and he sees the bloodied stump of his right arm, cut off at the elbow, his life spilling out onto the earth. 

His head is yanked roughly upwards by a hand in his hair, blood dripping from his long bangs into his stinging eyes and something is dropped in front of his face.

It’s red, with bright blue lines curving around it, faint demonic energy radiating off of it. It’s his own arm--the rest of it, at least, and the rush of nausea that slams into him is so strong that he can’t stop himself from choking up bile onto the singed ground beneath him, his broken ribs jostling painfully with the involuntary heaving of his body.

“Disgusting,” says a voice above him, rough and male, and so very distant, and he flinches as the point of the sword in his back digs deeper into the ground. As he coughs up the blood that’s pooling in his lungs, he finds himself distantly surprised that he even has any left.

“Look.”

The hand in his hair twists his head to the left, and, as he blinks away the black spots dancing in his eyes, he sees a young man with brown hair, only a few years older than him, fall to the ground, a blade in his chest and a blank, glassy dullness in his eyes that could only mean one thing.

His head is dropped roughly back into the ground, smacking against the dirt with dizzying force, but it doesn’t matter because he’s struggling again, thrashing against the sword in his stomach, trying to tear himself away, his left hand clawing against the ground for purchase until his fingers bleed.

He has to get to that other man, has to get to him even if he has to crawl, because maybe if he turns him over and presses his face against the man’s chest, he’ll hear a heartbeat instead of horrible, deafening silence, will see the life that loved him so deeply still in his eyes.

There’s laughter above him, raspy and mocking.

“Give it up.”

He hears a crackling above him, then a sudden flash of heat, and the heat source is deposited roughly to his right. Twisting his head, looking past the bleeding stump of his arm, he sees the fabric of his own navy blue coat catch alight with fire, orange-red flames licking their way upwards, getting closer and closer to his body.

He’s almost blind at this point, vision obscured by smoke and blood and pain, but beyond everything, he can make out the figure of a girl, cowering from an advancing attacker, her arms raised protectively over her head.

He has to save her--he has to save her,  _ hastosaveherhastosaveher-- _

The first of the flames reach his skin, and everything explodes into a mixture of pain and unbearable heat and it tastes like ash and smells like his own flesh and it hurts and it hurts and it hurts and it hurts and Dante isn’t here but he is here, he is this boy, he is this body, and he’s burning and he can’t  _ breathe-- _

_ get  _

He sees nothing anymore, his vision is dark, but the pain is very much there, and he’s losing himself. He’s losing who he is and what he knows, because all he knows is the pain--

_ the fuck _

He’ll do anything if it means this will end, if it means he can stop feeling, if the terrible heat will wash away and soothe his burns--

_ OUT _

There’s a rough, hard shove at his chest, and Dante feels like he’s been hit by a train, slammed back into his own body and into his own reality, and he’s lying on his back with his eyes closed and his skin pressed against the cool wooden surface of his floorboards. He inhales sharply, taking in large, gasping breaths as oxygen floods his lungs again.

The sense of relief he feels at the abrupt end of the pain is almost dizzying, but he’s too dazed to do much more than lie on his back and breathe. He hears a frantic shifting above him, then a soft thump next to him, and cold, clammy hands are touching his face, fluttering with frantic energy.

“Hey, shitty old man--say something. Don’t you fucking dare be taking a nap!” Nero’s voice is weaker than he’s ever heard it, but the words are sharp in their intensity, and he feels the boy’s hand drift to his shoulder, shaking him lightly.

_ Nero. _

Dante doesn’t even know how to begin to process what he’s just seen, but he knows, with absolute certainty, that Nero is now so much more than Dante had thought he was. 

He forces another gulp of air into his lungs, trying to calm his hammering heart, and pushes open his too-heavy eyelids to gaze up at Nero. 

The boy looks paler than ever, dark circles obvious underneath his wide, worried eyes, but Dante is surprised to see Nero up and awake at all, after what had happened. Blue eyes meet his own, and Nero clearly sags in relief, his hands going limp against Dante’s chest as he bows his head.

“Damn it…” Nero whispers, arms trembling with the effort of holding himself upright over Dante. “I thought you...I could feel you in my mind, and you were...you were freaking the fuck out. I thought you were going to--I thought...I had to kick you out.”

The vampire bites at his lip, his bangs shadowing his eyes.

“I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have had to see that.”

_ What the fuck. _

It takes an impossibly long moment for Dante to find his words. He sits up slowly, curling a hand around Nero’s shoulder and looking at him in silence before he--consequences and boundaries and everything else be damned--pulls Nero close to his chest, wrapping his arms around the kid. His face drops down into Nero’s soft, fluffy hair, one hand pressed gently against the small of Nero’s back, right over the spot where the sword had run him through, two thousand years ago.

Nero stiffens in his hold at first, but quickly goes limp, his face pressed into Dante's shoulder, fingers curling into the cloth of Dante’s black shirt as he rests his hands against Dante’s upper half.

There are so many things that Dante needs to say, that he should say, but instead, he sighs out, breath ruffling the soft, delicate strands of hair at the top of Nero’s head.

“Things haven’t been easy for you for a long time, huh, kid?” Dante asks lightly, even if he feels like his heart is twisting up, emotion strangling his words like vines. 

He feels Nero tremble against him, feels the wetness seeping through his shirt, and rubs soothingly at Nero’s back in response. The kid won’t look up at him, won’t show him his face, most likely to hide the fact that he’s crying, but Dante doesn’t mind, shifting them into a more comfortable position against the couch. 

Seems like they always end up on the floor, one way or another.

“I don’t mind that I saw it. It hurt like hell, yeah--but I’m not the one who lived through it, Nero. Unless...you’re bothered that I saw it? Didn’t mean to, I swear. Just...you were dreaming about it, or hallucinating, I think, and I didn’t want you to hurt yourself.”

Nero’s fingers play idly with the cloth of Dante’s shirt, and he coughs wetly, another dying spasm wracking his body. His strength is rapidly faltering, and Dante doesn’t know how much time they have left, but he’ll sit here with Nero, for as long as he needs to. Nero deserves that much, after everything that’s happened to him.

Hell, he deserves a  _ lot  _ more, but life isn’t always fair like that.

“No...I think I wanted you to see it, somehow. Don’t think the bond would have let you in my mind like that if I didn’t want it in some way.”

Dante thinks he understands. Nero’s been carrying this weight around with him for two thousand years, has likely never told a soul about it, has lived this same nightmare over and over again for god knows how many times over the course of his undead life. 

He thinks of himself, the way he keeps his emotions locked away, both metaphorically and physically, thinks of how little good compartmentalizing his feelings and closing his heart off has done him. He has a chance here to make things better for this kid, to make things a little easier before Nero passes on.

“You want to share a bit about yourself then, kid?” Dante prods gently, continuing to rub gentle circles into Nero’s back.

Nero is silent for a long moment but makes the tiniest of nods, an almost imperceptible motion had they not been pressed so close together.

Dante stays silent, leaning his head back against the couch as he waits for Nero to speak, giving the kid as much time as he needs to gather his thoughts.

“It was my fault,” he finally hears, coming from Nero’s frail, raspy voice, and Dante can’t help but think about how similar the two of them might be, at this moment. “You saw it, right? My...arm. The reason why Credo was killed...and the reason why Kyrie…”

The names sound awfully familiar, and Dante vaguely pins them down as the ones that Nero had been murmuring in his sleep. They’re probably the two people he’d seen in his shared vision of Nero’s past, and, thinking back on the burst of emotion he’d felt as Nero when he’d laid eyes upon them, they were definitely important to the kid.

“Grew up in a religious order--not sure if there are really any like it around here anymore. It was a really long time ago. They were a bunch of nutcases, if you ask me--but...I don’t know what happened. I turned nineteen, then I woke up and my arm was just...like that. Corrupted, somehow.”

So Nero really is only nineteen, and barely so, at that. No wonder the kid hates it when Dante spouts brainless shit about death.

“They came to get rid of me...because of it. But Credo and Kyrie wouldn’t let them kill me, so…”

He won’t make Nero say it--having to remember it every day of his life is already bad enough.

“I know. I saw. Is that why...you chose to come back? As a vampire, I mean.”

Nero sniffles lightly, fingers clenching harder in his shirt, but the boy doesn’t really have the strength to do much more. 

“Yeah. Kind of. I don’t really feel like I picked it--I just knew that Kyrie wasn’t dead yet, and I had to save her, no matter what. And then I... _ died _ , and when I woke up again, my right arm was back and was normal again and all my injuries were fine.”

He pauses then, and Dante can hear the way Nero swallows, suddenly reluctant to keep going on this part of the story. Dante gently presses against his back, looking down at Nero with more gentleness than he’d thought himself ever capable of. 

“Kid, I’ve seen a lot of shit. Hell, my own brother--well, that’s for another time, maybe. Point is, whatever you tell me, I won’t hate you for it. Won’t judge you for it at all. You’re still the same old immortal brat.”

His reassurance seems to be enough to encourage Nero to keep on going.

“I think...I killed them all. The soldiers that attacked us, I mean. I don’t remember much, it’s kind of blurry. Credo was already gone, but Kyrie was still there. But...but not  _ really  _ there. Afterward, she kind of wouldn’t...respond. She just sat next to Credo’s body--he was her brother, you know?--and didn’t move or talk. And I didn’t know what to do. I tried taking care of her, but...she also left.”

Nero shudders against him, whether from the relief of having finally unloaded his emotional baggage or from sickness and pain or from just how sad everything about the kid was.

“I buried both of them, right next to each other. And that’s...kind of it.”

They fall silent after that, and, in his arms, Nero shifts against him, tilting his head so that his ear is pressed against Dante’s chest, his eyes slipping shut. But Dante can somehow tell that Nero isn’t asleep, not really--he’s just quiet, listening for something.

“You feel like getting off of the floor, kid? Feels like we’re about to take up permanent residence here or something,” Dante finally speaks, a little hesitant to break the silence. 

Nero opens his eyes, and they’re a tired, faded blue, but he looks a lot more at peace than Dante’s ever seen him before. 

“Maybe you should invest in getting a carpet,” Nero murmurs, sighing against him, which Dante takes as an affirmative.

This time, Nero doesn’t protest when Dante picks him up in his arms, probably too tired and too close to the end of his life to argue much. The way the kid goes limp in his hold is bittersweet, and, on an impulse, instead of putting Nero back on the couch, he settles the boy on his bed, positioning them so that Nero is laying comfortably beneath the covers and Dante is sitting next to his head.

“You sure are feeling generous,” comes the dry comment, once the kid realizes where he is.

“Sure am,” Dante remarks back dryly. 

He looks up at the ceiling, feeling the pounding ache of a rapidly building headache behind his tired eyes, but he doesn’t want to sleep. If he goes to bed now, he will wake up to nothing. Nero will be gone.

“Why did you choose to help me, back then?” Dante finally asks, because now, more than ever, is the best time for honesty, it seems.

Nero is so silent and motionless that Dante thinks he’s gone back to sleep, but then, in a voice so quiet that Dante has to strain his ears to hear it, Nero replies, 

“Because you needed it. You were in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Didn’t think you deserved to die just because your shitty old man memory got you lost or something. A real pain in the ass it is now, huh?”

But Nero tilts his head, looking up at Dante through half-open, exhausted eyes, and, for the very first time since he’s met the boy, Nero smiles.

It’s nothing big--just a little halfway upwards tilt of his mouth, but it’s enough to make his fangs poke out from underneath his lip in an undeniably adorable way, and is more than enough to make Dante’s heart jump about three levels in his chest, picking up at a faster rate.

Nero is smiling at him, a sleepy, barely-there expression that is quickly fading as Nero’s eyes slip shut again.

And Dante, sitting in his day-old clothes, running off of over twenty-four hours of no sleep, comes to a realization. 

Nero is not going to die like this. 

Dante isn’t letting him go.

But this time, he has more than enough of the right reasons to hold on.

He cups the back of the boy’s head with his hand, fingers tangling in the silky white locks. Then he leans down, pressing his forehead gently against Nero’s shutting his eyes and curling his other hand around Nero’s shoulder so that he’s practically lying on top of the kid. 

They’re so close that he can feel Nero’s long eyelashes tickling his skin, can tell how shallow and faint the other’s breathing is, how close Nero’s life is to burning out.

“I want to get to know you, Nero,” he says lowly, and his heart finally,  _ finally  _ feels as open as should it be, open in a way it hasn’t been since Vergil was locked away behind bars. 

“I want to know all of you--the person you were and the person you are now. But I need time. Time with you. So...don’t snatch the chance away from me before I even get to start, kid.”

Nero sighs out against him, his gentle breath fluttering against Dante’s skin. His body goes completely limp underneath him, any sort of last resistance or protest he might have had left leaving him with Dante’s admission.

Dante pulls away, slightly, enough to see Nero’s eyes flickers open, to see the pale, nearly translucent haze of blue within them.

“I think….I think I want to know you too, Dante.”

Dante allows himself to feel relief for only a second before he gently rolls them over, flipping their positions so that Nero is laying on top of him, his face dangerously close to the crook of Dante’s neck.

He tilts his head, his fingers still gently curled in Nero’s hair, and Nero shifts wordlessly upwards, until the point of his fangs scrape cautiously against spot right above the collarbone.

Their eyes meet again, the connection between them tugging at the bottom of Dante’s stomach, a silent promise between the two of them for whatever future may follow next.

Then Nero closes his eyes, lowers his head, and, in such a gentle manner that Dante doesn’t even feel the sting, pierces through the fragile skin of Dante’s neck.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aAAAAAAAAAAAAAH this chapter hated me and i hated it   
> bit of a breather chapter after the last one (AKA semi-filler) but hopefully still acceptable  
> trying to show and not tell dante's backstory after i backstory dumped nero but am unsure of how much i have succeeded

There’s a lot of pizza.

Dante is sitting on his couch, with three open boxes of heavenly delight situated around him, and he’s got a slice in each hand, taking alternating bites out of each one. Lady and Trish, maybe as a reward for his astonishingly good behavior as of late, had happily and willingly bought him several boxes of the stuff, and Dante was certainly not going to pass up an opportunity for free food, much less pizza. 

It’s the best pizza he’s ever had, actually, and considering his extensive experience in this particular field, that’s a high compliment.

The cheese melts against his tongue with perfect texture, the dough of the pizza is crisp on the outside and tender in the middle, the crust crackles against his fingers in glorious melody, the tomato sauce dances across his senses with just the right combination of sour and slightly sweet--

“Yo.”

The toppings are divine, with everything on the menu set in perfect equivalence across the slice, and the detestable, grotesque demons known as olives are nowhere to be seen, possibly erased from existence—

“Hey, grandpa.”

There’s a bowl in front of him, a strawberry sundae glistening with fruit, red syrup poured over immaculately spherical mounds of vanilla ice cream. A spoon is already stuck in the bowl for him, ready and waiting for him to eat, a tangy burst of sweet to refresh his palate after indulging in the most glorious food known to mankind--

“Would you wake the fuck up?”

Dante is jolted roughly awake as the blankets covering him are yanked away, and something pokes him in the shoulder. He groans at the interruption, covering his eyes with an arm and trying to turn away, but he receives another prod for his trouble.

Reluctantly, Dante lowers his arm and cracks open his eyes, and is met with a very familiar, very annoyed blue glare.

“...Kid?” Dante asks, then clears his throat, surprised at how raspy his voice sounds. His throat is unusually dry, and his head feels light and unmoored in his skull.

Instead of answering, Nero reaches behind Dante’s head and stacks up the pillows before grabbing Dante by the shirt in a surprisingly strong grip and hauling him upwards until Dante is half-lying, half-sitting against them. He idly notes that he’s still wearing the same black t-shirt he probably went to sleep with.

While Dante is still struggling to figure out what’s going on, Nero twists around, picks up something behind him, and shoves a glass full of orange juice in front of his face.

Huh.

“What the hell is this?” He checks around the room for some sort of sign that he’s been launched into a parallel universe, but everything around his room looks perfectly normal, including Nero.

The kid looks much better than when Dante had last seen him, his skin pale, but not in a sickly way, and the dark circles underneath his eyes having all but vanished. His face is twisted in an expression of exasperation and something that could be embarrassment, judging from the way he keeps looking downwards, refusing to hold eye contact with Dante.

“It’s orange juice,” Nero replies patiently, even when they both know that Dante’s question had not at all been about the drink in Nero’s hand.

Dante takes the glass, inspecting the liquid carefully. He doesn’t think he’s had orange juice since he was a kid. He can’t even remember the last time he saw an orange in general.

“Where’d you even get this? Pretty sure my fridge is empty, except for pizza and beer.”

Nero shrugs, shifting on the bed and folding his legs so he can more comfortably face Dante. 

“It was. But Trish and Lady took me grocery shopping.”

Dante has an extremely hard time picturing it--the two renowned devil hunters and one vampire, pushing around a grocery cart and piling items into it. Maybe Trish and Lady really were getting soft, after all.

At Dante’s continued stunned silence, Nero fidgets uncomfortably, scowling down at his hands before reaching out and tapping lightly at the glass.

“I know you don’t exactly eat the healthiest, but you’d better drink this. The internet said that this is the kind of shit you’re supposed to do after you give blood. And I went through all this trouble to get some for you, too, so you’d better not let it go to waste.”

The  _ internet? _

“Wait, how’d you get on my computer, kid?”

Nero gives him a withering look. “Uh, I don’t know. Maybe because your password was  _ pizza?  _ Spelled with a one instead of an i?”

Dante, feeling somewhat offended, looks away, rubbing sulkily at his stubble. 

“I thought it was good.”

The boy sighs out, as if Dante has deeply disappointed him, and reaches behind himself for something on the nightstand again. “Speaking of which…”

As if by magic, a plate of steaming hot pizza is in Nero’s hands, and it takes Dante a painfully long time to realize that the scent of pizza has been in the room for a while now--it must have been why he was dreaming of it, actually. 

Dante makes a grab for the pizza, but Nero’s blue gaze suddenly meets his directly, burning into him. The enchantment of Nero’s vampiric hypnosis settles over his body almost immediately, and he has no choice but to go limp against the pillows, his grasp on the glass slackening. With superhuman reflexes, Nero snatches the glass of orange juice out of the air before it can spill over the bed, then holds it out to him again.

Completely unfair.

“No way--you’re not getting any of this until you drink this entire glass--you need food, but that shitty website says regenerating your red blood cells is more important.”

Dante groans out and reluctantly takes the juice as soon as he feels Nero dispel the hypnosis, staring into it with a kind of disgust. 

“You’re killing me here, kid.”

His throat does feel awfully dry though, as much as he hates to admit defeat, and with a somewhat sullen sigh, he raises the glass back up to his lips and sips at it carefully. He winces in disgust as the sour taste hits the back of his throat, not at all pleasant like tomatoes, but Nero gives him another sharp look, and Dante sullenly drinks the rest in silence.

“Was that really so hard?” Nero asks dryly, taking the empty glass back from him and holding out the pizza.

Dante doesn’t respond, mostly due to the fact that his mouth is full of tomato and cheese, and Nero sighs, fiddling with a loose thread on the bed sheets before starting to speak.

“So...we got a lot to talk about,” he says, in a somewhat ironic echo of Dante’s own words, not too long ago. 

The kid is definitely right--they really do have a lot to talk about. Admittedly, all Dante really wants to do is roll over and go back to sleep as soon as he’s done with his pizza, but Nero had stayed awake for him while he was literally on his deathbed, so Dante supposes that he owes it to the kid to be present for the following conversation.

Dante swallows as best as he can, wincing as the motion stings at his sore throat. “Wait, hang on. What time is it?”

Nero looks suddenly anxious, dropping his gaze away from Dante’s, like he’s afraid of giving the answer.

“It’s...2pm. Tuesday afternoon.”

Dante nearly chokes on the pizza in his mouth, sitting straight upright, his grip around the blankets so tight his knuckles nearly turn white.

“I’ve been asleep for  _ two days?” _

It’s definitely not the first time he’s been passed out for so long, nor is it the longest time he’s ever been asleep for. But it doesn’t really make the matter of his lost time any less alarming. 

That strange look passes over Nero’s face once more, and the boy tenses up, his expression shifting into something more guarded, almost defensive. Movement in the corner of Dante’s eye catches his attention, and he looks down to see Nero rubbing his own right arm, his regular nervous habit that Dante has noticed him do more than a few times since meeting him.

“One and a half, technically.”

“Yeah, real cute--why didn’t anyone wake me up?”

“Well, I  _ tried! _ But every time you either didn’t move or just rolled over and smacked my hand away. So when I heard you muttering about pizza, I figured that today was the first time you were sleeping lightly enough to finally get up.”

Dante groans, leaning back into the pillows and rubbing his temples with a hand. He’s always been a deep sleeper, but he hadn’t known he could sleep through active attempts to wake him up to this extent. Then again, he hadn’t exactly been in the best of conditions when he’d passed out to begin with.

“Damn it. I’m gonna get fired for sure. The school board will crawl so far up my ass that I’ll never take a shit again.”

Nero shoots him a half-disgusted look, but his expression quickly returns to that same cautious manner as before.

“I already called the school. Told them you were sick and everything. They said to take the week off--apparently, you’ve been acting really weird lately.”

“Yeah, that’ll happen when your live-in house vampire almost dies from starvation.”

He means it as a joke, a reference to something they’ve put past them, but maybe it’s not as far behind them as he’d like to think--or maybe Dante’s sense of humor is just really fucked up, because Nero looks in no way amused.

“I...sorry. About that, I mean.” 

Nero’s nervous habit kicks itself up a notch, and Dante is honestly worried he might rub his skin raw with the force of it. He still remembers the way Nero’s hands had looked, wrapped around his own neck, tearing into delicate skin. On impulse, he leans forward, more slowly this time, and wraps his hand around the boy’s wrist before he can do any harm to himself.

“That was a bad joke on my end. I do it a lot. Anyway, it’s all good--it seems like you sure got my shit in order--more than I can say for myself, actually. But what’s got you so worked up?”

Nero curls in on himself in a gesture that Dante knows well and he feels his concern spike sharply upwards. He subtly examines Nero as best as he can, looking for any sign of injury or indication that something had happened to the kid while he was asleep, but Nero looks far healthier than he has been in days.

Although considering Nero’s recent condition, that wasn’t exactly a high standard to surpass.

“Nothing. I just…”

Nero’s eyes flick to Dante’s neck, and the corners of his lips turn down even further before he drops his gaze back down to the bed. Instinctively, Dante reaches upwards, fingers brushing against his own neck in the place where he’d felt the skin break, finding nothing but smooth skin, and he’s certain that if he looked in a mirror, he wouldn’t see anything out of place either.

“You seriously don’t mind the fact that you’ve been out for so long?” 

Dante raises an eyebrow as he stuffs the rest of the pizza slice into his mouth, automatically looking around the room for more, but finding the end table heartlessly bare.

“It’s been worse. Besides, it seems like you’ve been taking pretty good care of me while I was out. I don’t usually get a babysitter, you know.”

He’s hoping that Nero will relax and bite back at his quip, but the kid only looks more unhappy than ever, and he tightens his grip on the kid’s wrist, at least trying to make Nero look back up at him. He’s only half successful in getting the kid to peek up at him from underneath his lashes, but with Nero, Dante will take what he can get.

“Hey, kid. You know you can talk to me. Didn’t we just have a whole thing about this? And it worked out pretty well for you, or at least I’d like to think so.”

“Yeah, it worked out well for  _ me,” _ Nero snaps, with a little too much emphasis on that last word for Dante’s liking, and he suddenly has a dawning suspicion of what this is all about. 

“What, you’re still beating yourself up over my blood? It was just a scratch, and you healed the bite up and everything. Don’t think I’m that bad off either, honestly.”

Nero tugs his wrist out of Dante’s grasp, folding his hands in his lap and looking miserably down at them. “Well, you didn’t see yourself after I was done. Your blood got all over the sheets and shit. And you wouldn’t wake up, no matter what I tried. As if it couldn’t be more obvious that I took too much from you.”

He tries his best to think through the fog in his mind, but his last memory is pulling Nero down on top of him, and the feeling of Nero’s fangs against the skin of his neck, and then after that, nothing. If he’d passed out while the kid was actually in the middle of drinking, then he definitely doesn’t blame the kid for being more than a little freaked out.

He should have been there, awake and alert for the end of it to reassure Nero, but the relief he’d felt when Nero had finally agreed to save his life had been overwhelming in nature. Combined with the oddly relaxing feeling of Nero licking at his neck and the fact that he hadn’t slept for over twenty-four hours at the point, it had been a little too easy for Dante to succumb to sleep.

But Nero definitely hadn’t seen it that way.

He’d probably pulled away from Dante’s neck and found himself faced with more blood than he knew what to do with, even after healing the puncture in Dante’s skin. And Dante isn’t certain how this entire supernatural sickness entirely worked, but he’s pretty sure Nero wouldn’t have recovered instantaneously, especially considering that the boy was still not quite back to normal, even after two days.

So it had been the kid, very much alone and afraid and weak from fever, trying to shake an unresponsive Dante awake, and, upon failing, likely believing that he’d killed or at least permanently injured the man. 

The mental image isn’t something that Dante wants to dwell on, especially when he takes the ending of Nero’s human life and the self-deprecating way that Nero had told him his story into account.

Dante knows what it’s like to feel like everything is his fault, even if Nero’s situation is different from his own, since, unlike Dante himself, the kid is  _ actually  _ free of guilt.

“Come on, kid,” Dante reaches out, trying to keep his voice as gentle as possible. 

Nero doesn’t pull away when Dante properly takes his hand in his own, absently running his thumb over the smooth skin at the back of Nero’s hand, and Dante takes the lack of an active response as a sign to continue.

“I’m sorry if it freaked you out at the moment, but I’m up and running now, aren’t I? Just took some pizza and a long nap to get me back up to speed. Not too different from how it normally is--I pass out after getting drunk all the time, so really, this is a step below one of my birthdays.”

The kid makes a sound that vaguely resembles a weak sort of laugh at that, and Dante feels the worry currently churning in his stomach ease up. He gives Nero’s hand a reassuring sort of pat, but keeps holding onto him, anyway. He doesn’t quite feel like letting go, and Nero doesn’t seem to mind either, so it’s probably okay.

“Trish and Lady kind of said the same thing when I asked them, too.”

“Wait, they were here?”

“I didn’t really know what to do...so I called them for help.”

Dante shifts warily, trying his best to catch Nero’s eye again. He loves Lady and Trish, he really does, and he knows that the two of them have grown fond of Nero as an individual, but a lifetime of prejudice against supernatural creatures is hard to look past. 

And if they’d walked into the bedroom, with Nero covered in the blood he’d drank from a very unconscious Dante, it wouldn’t exactly be difficult for them to piece together what was likely a very unflattering picture for the vampire.

“They didn’t... _ do _ anything to you, did they?” 

He still remembers the unresponsive, glassy-eyed look in Nero’s eyes as he’d laid on Dante’s floor, slowly healing the break in his own spine. It’s a lot worse when Dante thinks about the very similar memory of Nero’s death, and Dante decides he doesn’t want to think much about it at all, anymore.

“Uh. Well, I got better, so it’s okay,” Nero deflects, and Dante is not at all encouraged. “They were only upset at first, anyway--I did a pretty shitty job of explaining things, so they thought...anyway, I managed to calm them down, no big deal.”

“...right. And then you went...grocery shopping?”

“Well, if I’m going to be sticking around for such a long time, I’m not eating pizza every fucking day! And neither are you--I’m only making an exception today because you just woke up.”

Ordinarily, Dante would never have allowed a ban on his daily pizza to simply slide, but he’s a bit preoccupied thinking about the nonverbal implications of Nero hanging around him for long enough to permanently change his diet. 

Seems like the kid really does want to get to know him, after all.

He finally lets go of Nero’s hand and sinks back into the pillows, feeling much more relaxed with the knowledge that, not only does he have the rest of the week off from work,  but he also has an apparently very willing and ready Nero prepared to help him out for as long as Dante is an invalid.

“Guess I’d better stock up on pizza today, then. Mind getting me another slice, kid? Or slices, plural.”

Nero gives him a most displeased look, but is already getting off the bed, balancing the empty glass of juice on top of the dirty pizza plate. “Fucking lazy old man,” he grumbles underneath his breath, but Dante can hear him shuffling around the kitchen, and the kid comes back with two plates this time.

“What, you couldn’t have put it all on one plate?” Dante asks dryly, noting the rather large stack of five or so slices piled on top of one plate.

“Not everything is about you, you know.” Nero looks more embarrassed than anything as he shoves the five-piece plate into Dante’s waiting hands and settles back onto the bed, taking his usual tiny rabbit nibble out of the singular slice on his plate.

Dante feels a highly irrational sense of victory at the sight, but decides this once to restrain himself from gloating, noting the pink flush on Nero’s face. He can give the kid a break for one day, at least. Besides, after two days of having eaten nothing, he and pizza have a lot of catching up to do.

“So,” he mumbles out between bites, and Nero twists his expression in disgust as his eyes track the motion of the crumbs and tomato sauce stains falling from Dante’s mouth to the sheets. Dante doesn’t particularly care, but Nero hands him a napkin, looking rather pained.

“I  _ just  _ did the laundry, you know.”

“Yeah, sorry,” Dante waves a hand, brushing off the complaint. The kid should know by now what Dante’s preferred living condition was. “Anyway, do you know how often you’re gonna need to drink up my blood? Maybe we should work out a schedule or something like that.”

Nero sweeps up the crumbs that Dante is leaving into a neat pile, brushing them onto a spare napkin, leaving the uneaten half of his own pizza slice on his plate. When the kid’s not looking, Dante tries reaching out for it, but the plate is snatched away faster than he can track.

“Hey, hands off! You got your own right there. And...I don’t know? Can’t we just wait until I start getting sick again before I drink?”

“Don’t be like that, kid. You already gave me a heart attack last time we went around that block. It’ll be fine, trust me. So, what’ll it be? Three times a day? Breakfast, lunch, and dinner?”

“You don’t even eat breakfast.”

Dante points his pizza crust at the kid. “I make a mean sunny-side up, actually. Don’t dodge the question.”

“It...should only be once a day. Probably. I mean, I can always take less…I probably won’t get sick if I skip a couple of days.” 

“Yeah, that’s not happening. The skipping, I mean. I’ll just drink a gallon of orange juice afterward or something, and everything will be peachy. Or orange-y, I guess.”

Nero frowns. “You hate orange juice.”

Dante shrugs, chewing fervently at his fourth slice. “Sometimes, you gotta make sacrifices for the important things, you know.”

Nero goes quiet at that, picking idly at his plate of pizza, an obvious blush creeping up his neck, and Dante assumes that he’s won. The subject of Nero’s dietary habits aren’t exactly up for debate, anyway--Dante would rather die than allow Nero’s condition to deteriorate to that point again.

“Hey, grandpa. Don’t know if your old-ass memory can still recall, but...did you mean what you said?”

He doesn’t have to elaborate further--Dante knows what he means. With his free hand, he reaches over, ruffling Nero’s soft white hair, then cups the back of the kid’s head again in a distant memory from before.

“I always mean what I say.”

“Well...good. Because I meant it too. I gotta figure out the mystery of why you’re such a fucking weirdo.” 

“Yeah, that’ll take a while. Years, maybe. You prepared for that kind of adventure?”

“That a challenge? You’re on, shitty old man.”

The kid meets his gaze directly, blue eyes sparking with something like excitement, and, almost imperceptibly, he smiles again, a hint of fang poking out from underneath his lip before he ducks his head and covers his mouth with his hand.

It’s a shame, really--Nero’s smile is awfully cute, and Dante definitely wouldn’t mind seeing more of it.

“Anyway, are you done eating? Because you really need a fucking shower.”

Dante snorts, running a hand through his tangled hair, feeling admittedly grimy. 

“What, you couldn’t have cleaned me up while I was out?”

Nero’s blossoming flush darkens into a deep red, and he kicks Dante lightly in the leg with his socked foot. 

“Not everyone is as creepy as you! I still haven’t forgotten that you changed my clothes when we first met.”

The kid has a point. Not that Dante would ever concede to that.

“Well, you don’t seem to mind  _ too  _ much,” he comments, nodding at Nero, who is currently dressed in a fresh set of Dante’s clothes, all of which are more than a little loose on him. “Seeing as you helped yourself.”

“You’d rather I walk around naked?”

“Wasn’t saying that, but now that you suggest it…” 

Dante barely manages to dodge out of the way as a pillow is thrown at his face by a very furious, very embarrassed looking Nero. 

“Would you just go already?”

Dante chuckles, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and standing up somewhat slowly, testing to make sure his limbs can hold his weight first. Nero is watching him carefully, eyes narrowed and body tense, like he’s expecting Dante to fall over, but, despite the minor amount of shakiness that he feels, walking seems to be pretty alright.

“Don’t suppose you’d help me out?”

Another pillow, hurled with deadly accuracy, hits the spot of the wall right next to his head, hard enough to make Dante’s hair flutter with the impact. He holds his hands up in surrender, taking the hint as he turns to disappear off into the bathroom.

Out the corner of his eye, he sees Nero duck his head again, covering his mouth with a hand, and Dante can’t help but smile himself.

_ Welcome home, kid. _

 

* * *

 

Things are a lot easier between them after Nero’s near-death experience.

They fall into a routine over the days, with Nero taking his daily blood from Dante every night. Dante’s figured out that it’s for the best that they do it at that time, because, for some reason, Nero always seems to get really sleepy after he’s done. Dante can’t help but secretly enjoy it, because a sleepy Nero is apparently a strangely smiley Nero, and Nero’s smiles are  _ cute _ .

The boy still seems reluctant to take from him, always pausing and looking up at his face carefully before he actually drinks, like he wants to say something, but in the end, he always does so anyway.

It’s a nice mutual exchange that they have going on. He more or less takes care of Nero, and Nero does his best to whip Dante’s life into shape.

Dante no longer needs to set alarms on his phone, because every weekday morning, without fail, the kid kicks open the door to his room, forcefully drags his half-asleep, mildly protesting ass out of bed, and puts a plate of pizza and a glass of orange juice in front of him.

All attempts to convince Dante to eat something other than pizza have pretty much failed, so they’ve compromised with Dante getting more of his nutrients through various fruit juices. Nero, meanwhile, has apparently become all but addicted to some colorful, fruity, marshmallow-filled cereal, and Dante’s found that a good portion of his grocery bill is now being funneled into milk and sugared carbohydrates.

He doesn’t mind, though.

Nero looks a little too happy whenever he chows down on it, and sometimes, the marshmallows get stuck on his fangs, which is both hilarious and surprisingly cute. Dante’s only owned up to the “hilarious” part of it, though. The kid would probably punch him if Dante called him cute out loud.

Still, it doesn’t stop him from sneaking glances over at Nero between bites of pizza, hoping to catch the kid in the middle of a marshmallow. Luckily, Nero is currently sorting through the mail, too preoccupied to notice Dante’s discontinuous staring.

He can’t help it--the kid is just nice to look at.

He’s been having a lot of these types of thoughts about Nero, lately, and he’s not entirely sure what to do with them. He can’t deny that his interest in Nero over the weeks that he’s known the kid for has strayed off of the platonic path into some kind of blurry territory, but he knows just as well that he can’t be allowed to act upon his emotions. 

Their relationship is a little complex, to say in the least--Nero’s an ageless vampire who looks nineteen, and Dante’s a very mortal history professor who very much looks the thirty or so years that he has.

On top of that, Nero is quite literally dependent on Dante to survive, relies on him for both food and shelter. Even with the purest of intentions, that sort of codependency isn’t something that Dante wants in a potential relationship.

In all honesty, he’s hoping that if he ignores his burgeoning feelings long enough, they’ll go away. 

“Hey, Dante. Don’t tell me you’re still asleep.”

Nero is snapping his fingers in front of Dante’s face, glaring at him sternly, a thin envelope held carefully in his other hand. Dante blinks back to reality, trying to focus on the other, only vaguely curious about the mail.

“Huh?” he asks blankly, and Nero gives him a long-suffering sigh.

“This letter--it’s addressed to you. Doesn’t look like junk mail, either.”

Dante’s eyes catch the sight of the official red stamp inked into the back of the paper, the familiar, distinctive marks of the envelope having been opened and resealed and he feels his heart stop in his chest.

“Give me that, kid.”

He tries to keep his voice calm and his face neutral, even as he can hear the blood rushing in his ears and the world narrows down to the name scratched in proper, neat handwriting at the top of the envelope. 

But Nero is still looking over the letter, turning it over in his hands, and Dante stands up, a bit too abruptly, the sharp scratch of his chair against the wooden floorboard startling the kid as he looks up in confusion. 

“Uh, what? You weren’t interested in what I was saying before--you gotta ask nicely if you want it now.”

The rational part of him knows that Nero is joking, that Nero doesn’t understand the weight of the paper he’s carrying, but his emotions around this subject have always been particularly illogical. 

“Nero, give it to me  _ now,” _ he repeats, and the low growl in his words, combined with whatever expression that’s currently on his face is enough to startle Nero into silence, and the boy wordlessly hands over the envelope.

Dante snatches it up, a little too quickly, then turns and heads off into the bedroom without explanation, slamming the door behind him hard enough to rattle the thin walls of their apartment. 

He always shuts his doors with enough force to make sure they stay closed.

His hands tremble as he fishes out his key from its usual place, unlocking his bedroom drawer and tossing the envelope in with the rest just like it, the stack of unopened letters resting right next to Lady’s gun. Then he seals the drawer again without looking at any of its contents, trying to forget the way his breakfast pizza turns uncomfortably in his stomach.

It takes at least ten minutes before he’s managed to calm himself down enough to emerge from his bedroom, where Nero is still sitting at his kitchen table, watching him carefully with a nervous, concerned expression. The second the kid catches sight of him, he looks back down into his cereal, trying to appear casual.

“So…” Nero begins, but Dante cuts him off.

“How much of the writing on that envelope did you read?”

Nero looks properly up at him, the startled rabbit look returning to his features, and some part of Dante feels bad about it, but he can’t let himself focus on that now.

“Not...much. Just, um...the name? Vergil?”

God, Dante is _so_ fucked--even just the sound of his brother’s name is enough to twist his stomach into knots, a phantom pain stinging at his lower right abdomen. 

“What’s going on, Dante?” Nero asks carefully, and Dante doesn’t answer, scooping up his dirty plate from the table and depositing it into the sink, turning on the tap. 

He doesn’t ever do the dishes, but he needs a distraction now, something to keep his hands busy and give him an excuse to avoid looking at Nero. He can feel the kid’s gaze burning into his back as he dries off the plate and puts it carefully into the rack.

“Nothing. Just a letter,” he finally says, when the silence between them grows too long.

Nero is very quiet for a long moment, and Dante doesn’t have to turn around to hear the hurt in the kid’s voice.

“You can tell me about shit like this, you know.”

No, he can’t. 

He really can’t. He can hardly handle having to tell himself the truth every day, can’t even stay sober on his own birthday because of it. Not even his birthday--he can’t even stay sober  _ normally _ .

“Sorry, kid. Not this time,” Dante replies, perhaps a bit too roughly, because Nero doesn’t say anything at all for a long time after that.

It’s hardly fair to Nero, he knows. The boy had practically told him everything, had spilled out his secrets and the story of his  _ own death _ to Dante, and Dante didn’t even have the decency to return the favor. He really should talk about with someone, and maybe a part of him even wants to, but every time he tries, the words tangle in his throat like thorns, and he can never manage to push them out.

He does try to apologize to Nero though, more than once, but Dante’s mind and mouth don’t seem to be very connected today, and in the end, he stays silent.

“Don’t you have to go to work?” Nero finally asks, and Dante chances a look at the kid, who is staring down into his bowl of cereal rather unhappily, refusing to lift his eyes upwards.

Usually, Nero comes with him to work, even though they’ve discovered that the bond is no longer quite so adamant about keeping them in close proximity to one another. The kid is just a nice presence to have around, and Nero genuinely seems to like the feeling of attending school, enjoying the chance to get to experience what he never had in his human life.

But there’s a cold, tense sort of silence in between them now, and in the end, Dante figures that it’s best if the two of them maintain some space between another.

He strides over, tugging his red leather coat off of the back of the chair and pulling it on. He’s definitely fucked up, but he doesn’t know how to fix this. He’ll probably have to call Lady and Trish for advice later, even if they’ll yell at him for upsetting Nero. The two of them have become surprisingly protective over the boy.

Must be the angry rabbit inside of Nero that’s attracting all these weirdos to fawn over him.

“Yeah. Can’t be late. Uh...see you later. I guess.”

Nero shrugs in response, apparently content with giving Dante the silent treatment, but as Dante is stepping out the door, he catches the softness of the other’s voice, so quiet that Dante almost misses it.

“Stay safe, old man.”

It’s an opening, one that Dante should really take, but his stomach is still turning violently in on itself with thoughts of Vergil, and he’s afraid that if he lets Nero into his heart on this matter, he won’t be able to stop what will eventually come out. So, like the royally fucked up asshole he is, he pretends that he didn’t hear Nero at all, shutting the door behind him.

The rest of day is spent in a relative haze because his mind won’t leave the topic of Vergil alone, as it always does. Dante hates lingering in the past, hates having to revisit the same memory over and over again, but he’s no longer in control of his own thoughts. Vergil’s face--exactly the same as his own, but ten years younger--flickers behind his eyelids, and every time he blinks, the scene changes, going from past to present.

Sometimes he zones out, and when he tunes back in, he’s in his old apartment, the floor covered in shattered glass and blood, the door blown clear off of its hinges. Or he’s staring up at a white ceiling, laying a white bed with starched white sheets, listening to the steady beeping of the monitor measuring out the pace of his heart.

The worst is when he’s sitting in a hard wooden chair, trying to find his words, but losing them along the way, his ability to speak or think rapidly wilting underneath the unrelenting blue gaze that never leaves his face.

By the time he comes back to the present, his workday is over and he’s sitting with his back to the wall, his fingers automatically dialing Lady’s number before his mind can catch up with the rest of him.

“Dante?” Lady asks, sounding like she’s in the middle of dinner, and Dante pulls his phone away from his ear to check the time. It’s nearly eight, meaning he’s been sitting in this empty room for god knows how long, his body unmoving while his mind floated off in between the folds of his past.

Fuck. 

He’s so screwed up, will never  _ be  _ anything but screwed up, and he’ll do this over and over again for the rest of his life, losing chunks of his present to his past and losing his senses to the sweet haze of alcohol.

“I need a drink,” Dante begins, and he can hear the noise on the other end of the phone come to a halt. He can’t begin to bring himself to care--the well of his emotion has run dry somewhere in between his old memories, and he can’t draw anything else up from it.

“Before you say anything, we both know there are only two ways this can happen. Either I drive off and go find a bar by myself and get completely shitfaced, or you and Trish can take me. Your choice.”

Lady exhales slowly on the other end, and Dante can sense her disapproval on the other end of the line. The girls have expressed concern for his little drinking habit for a while now, but they’ve been through this loop so many times that all three of them know that Dante won’t stop drinking until he wants to.

And he doesn’t want to.

His flashbacks are shitty enough as it is--he can’t imagine facing his deep-seated issues head-on, without the safety net that alcohol affords him.

“What about Nero?” Lady finally says, and Dante rubs at his face with his hand.

The kid’s mad at him anyway, probably won’t care much if he comes home or not.

“What about him? He can take care of himself,” Dante answers, and he knows it’s not what Lady wants to hear, but she’ll oblige him anyway, if only because he needs someone to keep him out of trouble while he’s wasted.

The girls pull up dutifully outside of campus sometime later, and Dante will have to remember to send them a gift basket or something later, for always being there for him, no matter how shitty and fucked up his hopeless ass is. They’re wearing matching expressions of disapproval on their faces, but no matter how much they dislike this, neither of them are about to let Dante drive himself home while drunk.

“Thanks,” he grunts out, piling himself in, and Trish rolls her eyes but turns her attention to pulling back onto the main road.

It’s a little bit of a blur after they actually get to the bar, but not unpleasantly so. At the very least, he’s firmly rooted in the present as he throws back shot after shot, his mind sinking underneath a haze of colors and motion.

Like this, he feels light and unanchored, and the cloud of nothingness is taking up so much space in his head that he has no time to dwell on old memories, just the way he likes it. Sure, he has to sacrifice quite a bit of his motor control and his sense of spatial orientation, and Trish and Lady do have to practically drag him out of the bar when they decide he’s had more than enough, but it’s well worth it.

He’s duly impressed with Trish and Lady for successfully depositing him back home because he hadn’t even realized that they were standing outside of his own apartment door until the door cracks open and a half-concerned, half-angry blue gaze peeks out at him from underneath a mop of fluffy white hair.

“Hey, kid,” Dante gets out, freeing himself from Trish and Lady’s grip and stumbling forward towards Nero.

Nero yelps as the world around Dante spins unpleasantly and he finds himself pitching forward, saved from smashing his head against his wooden floorboards when Nero props him up, his hands uncertainly pressed against Dante’s chest and shoulder.

“Uh. Is this normal?” Nero asks, sounding very far away to Dante’s ears. 

Dante shuts his eyes, not really wanting to look at the world while it’s still twisting around and he instead buries his face in the kid’s hair because the top of Nero’s head is very soft and smells a bit like strawberries and vanilla. He feels Nero shift underneath him as he does so, probably trying to look around Dante at Lady and Trish, whose presence Dante had sort of forgotten about.

Nero is very warm, and he doesn’t know much else. Can’t be bothered to think of anything else.

“Sort of. Sorry about this, Nero. He’s had a bad day.” 

“I can tell. Don’t worry. I, uh...I’ll deal with him. Thanks for taking the stupid bastard back, at least.”

“Sure. Good luck, kid.”

There’s some shuffling noises behind him, as Trish and Lady presumably leave, and the door closes behind him. His face is suddenly being pushed up by a hand as Nero cranes his neck to look at him, the anger in his blue eyes startlingly clear to Dante.

“So this is where you went off to?” Nero asks, starting to drag Dante off to the bedroom, and Dante is highly grateful for Nero’s vampiric strength supporting him. It kind of allows Dante to collapse against the kid bonelessly while Nero pushes back the blankets to make room for him and hauls him up on top of the bed.

“Yup,” Dante answers, after a pause, a little too focused on the sensation of Nero’s hands against his body, feeling the warmth even through the layers of cloth between their skin. “Drank a lot. Of alcohol.”

Perhaps an unnecessary clarification, but Dante feels the need to tack it on, nonetheless.

“Well, you smell like you took a fucking  _ bath  _ in it, that’s for sure. Your clothes totally stink.”

Nero is suddenly tugging at his shirt, and Dante complies with his motions obediently, allowing the kid to wrestle the cloth over his head. The kid pauses as he looks down at Dante’s bare chest, and it occurs to Dante that it’s the first time Nero has seen his exposed upper half.

He follows Nero’s gaze to where the kid is staring at his lower right abdomen, and he chuckles out loud, his tongue heavily loosened by the influence of alcohol.

“You lookin’ at the scar, kid? Yeah--I know it’s not pretty.” 

Nero looks hesitantly up at his face, and Dante waves his hand lazily in some sort of invitation. Invitation to do what, he isn’t quite sure, but maybe he’ll be able to think of it when he’s sober.

Gently, the boy reaches out, his fingers brushing against the mottled skin of Dante’s scar in a feather-light touch. Dante normally gets pretty antsy whenever anyone is even near his scar, but Nero’s touch feels oddly nice, somehow.

“Can I ask about it? Or is it another ‘not this time’ kind of thing?” 

Nero’s last words are a bit sharper than normal, and Dante winces at the reminder of his guilt, but the emotion can’t really pierce through the haze in his mind at the moment.

“Little parting gift from my big brother,” he mumbles out, and Nero stiffens, unconsciously pressing harder against Dante’s skin. “Ran his blade through me and everything. You know how it is. Sibling rivalry and all that.”

He can’t stop the bitter laugh that tumbles out of him, and when he looks up at Nero, the look in the kid’s eyes is...protective, almost.

“Your brother did this to you? Is that...who Vergil is?”

Dante rolls his head back into the pillows, flinging an arm over his eyes.

“Sure is. Good work, kid. Figured it all out. Sorry I didn’t tell you.”

There’s so much more to the story, but Nero at least now knows the worst of it, that Vergil would stop at nothing to attain the form of power he so desperately craved. That Dante had been completely useless in the face of it.

Nero sighs, relaxing against him in a moment of silence long enough for Dante to uncover his eyes out of curiosity. The boy is still staring down at his stab wound, a frown twisting up his cute face, and Dante doesn’t really think he likes that.

He wants Nero to smile, wants Nero to let him see that cute smile of his instead of covering it up all the time. Maybe he wants to kiss that smile, if he’s honest with himself--and he can only ever be this honest with himself when he’s drunk like this.

“You still mad at me?”

Nero reaches over, then lays his hand against Dante’s forehead, brushing back Dante’s hair from his face, and Dante leans into how good the cool touch feels. 

“No,” Nero answers softly, his blue eyes softening into something actually fond. “I thought about it while you were gone. I shouldn’t have been mad at you in the first place. I’ve had...a lot more years to think about what happened to me. Besides, I was really only so willing to talk about it because I thought I was going to die. It wasn’t fair of me to expect the same type of honesty from you when they weren’t really under the same circumstances.” 

Nero’s words are a bit much to process when Dante is this drunk, but he sees the warm look on Nero’s face and the gentleness in his soft voice and understands that the kid is, with that kind heart of his, forgiving him. 

“But you could have at least stopped here and let me know where you were going. I was worried about you, you asshole. You didn’t come back.”

Dante tries to focus his gaze on Nero, but it’s hard, especially when he feels so exhausted.

“Sorry. Lost track of time.”

A shitty excuse, but sadly true.

“Stupid,” Nero shakes his head, but he trails his fingers down to brush against Dante’s jaw, tracing the curve of his face with his kind touch. Dante takes the opportunity to study Nero’s face, notes his complexion, more drawn and paler than usual.

Right. There was still something Dante had to take care of.

“Oh yeah--you thirsty?” Dante asks, angling his head slightly to the left.

Nero looks at him for a long moment, clearly conflicted with himself before he shakes his head.

“I don’t...know. It’s maybe not a good idea.”

“Come on, kid. You know you want to.”

Nero seems to deflate, before hesitantly reaching for Dante’s arm. Dante blinks, his thoughts colliding with each other in slow motion. Nero hasn’t drunk from his hand since they first met, actually--it was a lot easier and faster to drain blood from the neck, after all.

“Let me try something first,” Nero finally says, running the fingers of his free hand over the strong surface of Dante’s forearm, then down to his palm. He looks up at Dante again, who does his best to look reassuring, even as he’s falling asleep.

Apparently, he succeeds, because the index finger tracing the flesh of his palm sharpens into a razor-sharp claw, and Nero makes a small incision in his skin, blood welling to the surface of the cut. Dante doesn’t even feel it with how numbed his senses are by alcohol, and he watches with a detached sort of interest as Nero lifts his palm to his mouth and tentatively licks at the blood.

He’s expecting Nero to keep drinking like he always does after the first taste, but after a moment, Nero coughs out harshly and rapidly and drops Dante’s hand, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. 

“Something wrong?” Dante asks, because he has at least enough awareness left to piece together that they’ve gone off script here.

Nero shakes his head, clearly stifling another cough, then takes Dante’s palm in his hand and licks at it again, this time closing up the cut, much to Dante’s muddled confusion.

“We’ll, uh...we’ll talk about it in the morning.”

The kid’s voice sounds a bit strained, and he coughs into his elbow again, swiping quickly at his eyes. 

“You should just get some sleep for now, grandpa. You look like you’re about to pass out at any moment.”

There’s something definitely very wrong with this, but Dante is so exhausted and feels so painfully empty inside that he can’t bring himself to push back. Maybe when he wakes up, maybe on a day when Vergil isn’t haunting his thoughts, he can ask about it. 

But not now.

“Hey, kid,” he murmurs, tugging at Nero’s sleeve, and the boy looks down at him, the question clear in his eyes.

“Stay?” Dante asks, because he doesn’t think he wants to be alone tonight. He doesn’t want to be alone on any night, actually, but this is the one time that he has an excuse and his inhibitions are lowered enough for him to actually reach out and ask.

Nero doesn’t answer him verbally, but a second later, the kid has shifted so that he’s on Dante’s left side, lying with his head on top of Dante’s bare chest, his ear pressed against Dante’s skin. 

Dante drops his arm downwards, wrapping his arm around the kid’s waist, a slow sort of realization coming to him.

“You listening to my heartbeat?”

Even at the angle they’re in, he can see the way Nero’s face flushes.

“It’s...nice, okay? I don’t have one anymore, so...I like seeing how it feels again. Don’t make things fucking weird, you asshole.”

“Whatever you say,” Dante mumbles, but he’s definitely endeared by the thought, and ends up shifting Nero much closer to him. The boy doesn’t seem to mind too much, curling up further against him, his soft hair tickling Dante’s chest.

It’s easy enough for Dante to fall asleep with Nero against him, a warm, comforting weight pressed against his side.

He thinks he might dream of his past, of his old apartment and his blood on the floor and the endless white of his hospital bed. 

It’s all the same, it’s always the same.

But when he looks into blue eyes, the gaze pinning him down and unraveling everything that Dante is, they’re a gentle, baby blue, and hold two thousand years of life within them.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ASHFASHFS I TAKE IT BACK THIS IS THE WORST CHAPTER NOW  
> THEEEEEEE WORST AHGHGAH  
> pretty emotion heavy too  
> STRONG TW for alcohol withdrawal symptoms, unintentional semi-suicide ideation/attempt

When Dante comes to, feeling the pounding in his head behind his closed eyelids, he’s surprised at how gentle his awakening seems to be.

Usually, after one of his particularly bad nights out, Trish and Lady storm into his place first thing in the morning and yank open the curtains, dragging him roughly out of bed and giving absolutely no rest to his poor, aching head. It’s what he deserves, honestly, after being stupid enough to drink himself into an actual hangover, but it sure as hell doesn’t make it any less awful.

This time his room is quiet--he’d actually woken up naturally, without any outside influence. There’s no sign of crazy women in his near vicinity, and he’s still snuggled comfortably underneath layers of blankets

“Uh...you awake?” Nero’s soft voice drifts in from somewhere over to his right, so quiet that Dante actually has to strain to hear it, and Dante forces his eyes open with a light groan, bracing himself against the pain in his head.

The room is almost completely dark, the curtains over his singular bedroom window drawn shut and a layer of towels hung in front of them in an almost touchingly considerate gesture. In the bare minimum amount of light that still escapes through the barriers, Dante can make out the shadow of Nero’s form sitting next to his head, but can’t quite capture the expression on Nero’s face.

“Unfortunately,” Dante mumbles, covering his eyes with his bare forearm, pushing the covers on top of him down to his waist for some breathing room with his other hand. “How’d you know?”

The pressure on the bed underneath him changes as Nero shifts, and Dante imagines that the kid is rubbing at his right arm, as he always does, thinking over his words before he next speaks.

“Your breathing changed. And your heart always picks up a little when you first wake up.”

Dante has a sudden, vague, extremely fuzzy memory of fluffy hair tickling against the bare skin of his chest, and of Nero’s head pressed against him, listening carefully. He digs around his brain, looking for more, but the previous night only comes to him in bits and pieces that he can’t quite connect together.

“Oh. Good to know, I guess.”

He slowly uncovers his face, examining Nero carefully. He should probably sit up for the conversation that they might be about to have, but he doesn’t really think he has the energy for it, and besides, he doubts that his head will allow him to move around much without complaint.

“Hey, kid. Be honest. How much did I run my mouth last night?”

Even in the dim lighting, he can see the way Nero stiffens, his mouth pressing into a tight line as he looks down at Dante.

“You don’t remember?”

“Kinda. I’m getting the sense I told you something,” Dante says, casting his own gaze downward at his bare upper half, eyes resting on the jagged scar etched into his skin, painfully obvious even in the dark. “Let me guess--it was about this little beauty mark?”

The look that Nero gives him is carefully measured, and Dante can tell that the kid is clearly unsure of which direction to take this.

“You didn’t tell me that much, if it makes you feel any better. Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you about it at all while you were like that.”

Dante isn't quite sure how he feels about it, even. He’s certain that even now, with the kid knowing who Vergil is and just about the worst of what his brother did to him, he doesn’t want to tell the kid the full story. He doesn’t want his drunken rambling to become some kind of open gateway, or to be seen as some kind of indication that Dante is ready to talk, because he’s definitely not.

He probably won’t ever be, and that’s fine with him. Some things should stay shut and locked away forever.

But all the same, he can’t blame Nero for being curious, nor can he fault the kid for poking into such an obvious inquiry. The responsibility for last night lies largely at Dante’s feet anyway, for getting himself into such an emotionally vulnerable situation in the first place.

“Don’t worry about it,” he answers vaguely, and Nero seems to take the hint, because he doesn’t press on the topic any further, instead covering Dante back up with the blankets and resting his hand on his forehead.

Dante sighs out, relaxing into the oddly warm touch.

Then he frowns. It takes a few seconds, due to his hangover, but now that he’s not completely plastered, it’s much easier for him to connect the thoughts that had been lurking in the back of his mind.

“Hey,” he says carefully, reaching up and putting his hand over Nero’s, as if to confirm the presence of heat. He remembers feeling it last night, but when he thinks back over the past month or so that he’s been with Nero since the boy had recovered from his sickness, he can’t particularly recall any other time that Nero had given off body heat except for when he’d been sick from blood-deprivation.

“What’s up with this?”

Nero’s hand tenses against his skin, and Dante feels uneasy again, especially as Nero keeps silent, like he’s pretending that if he stays quiet, he won’t have to answer.

“You getting sick again?”

His free hand automatically goes to his neck, but there isn’t a wound there--there never is, not with the way Nero always heals it up after he’s done. Still, he doesn’t remember Nero drinking from him last night, nor does he feel the familiar lightheadedness or the sour taste of fruit juice in the back of his throat that Nero usually forces him to consume in the aftermath.

The kid exhales slowly, apparently relenting to Dante’s questions.

“I guess I did say we would talk about it in the morning. Still...thought you’d be feeling pretty shitty after last night.”

Dante is, in fact, feeling pretty shitty, but he isn’t about to just fall back asleep while this kind of topic is still hanging in the air.

“I’ll be fine, kid. I’ve had worse. Now, spill. You didn’t drink from me last night, did you?”

He thinks he can remember Nero pushing his arm away, coughing into the sleeve of his hoodie, and a sneaking suspicion that he really doesn’t want to think on begins to form in the back of his mind.

He hopes that what he’s thinking isn’t true, but, considering the way things in his life usually turn out, Dante tries to keep his expectations low.

“I...no, I didn’t. I couldn’t,” Nero admits hesitantly, and Dante can see the way his blue eyes flicker anxiously up to his face, no matter how much Nero tries to hide it.

“Because I was drunk.”

It’s not a question--rather, Dante is stating a fact that both of them know to be true, except Dante has been too stupid this entire time to realize it.

Nero gives a very small, reluctant nod, and Dante closes his eyes, leaning his head back.

“Well, shit,” he begins, before a sickening feeling begins to line the pit of his stomach. “But it’s not like I’ve stopped drinking since I met you. I’ve had at least a bottle a night, every night. Sometimes more.”

The silence that stretches on after his words tells Dante everything he needs to know and he finally forces himself to sit up, worry and anger clashing together violently within him, fueling his movements. He needs to be facing Nero for this, and he’s done enough useless lying around anyway.

Nero holds up his hands, fingers brushing barely against Dante’s skin, the concern on his face being hastily shoved underneath a defensive mask as Nero hurries to protest.

“It’s not that big of a deal--”

“You’ve been drinking my contaminated blood every night for what, a month now? And you haven’t said a word?” Dante interrupts, because he isn’t having this. He’s not about to let Nero just brush this aside like it means nothing, because it _does_ mean something.

“Well, I didn’t think I was in a place to complain,” Nero snaps, his defiance quick to rise up in front of him, much like a shield.

“No matter how willingly you give it, the point still stands that humans like you aren’t meant to be losing this much blood every night! So..you’re being nice enough to agree to this. I’ll take what I can get. It’s been...drinkable up until last night. It was just really bad then because of how much you had in your blood.”

Dante can see, in the back of his mind, the way the kid always is after nearly every night that he feeds on Dante. He can see the way that Nero curls up, suddenly terribly sleepy and strangely free of restraint in his emotions, his cute little smiles coming in easier and more often.

Not so cute anymore, now that Dante knows the truth.

“Drinkable, sure. But good for you? Not a chance in hell.”

Nero scowls, Dante’s words apparently hitting the mark.

“So what?” The kid asks, looking down at Dante in some kind of challenge. “I know enough to realize that you can’t go without alcohol for like, more than a day. Are you trying to tell me you’re going to quit?”

“Uh, that’s the logical conclusion, yeah.”

His words come easily, but the action that’ll have to follow definitely won’t. He’s tried a couple of times in the past to quit, but none of his attempts have been even remotely successful. If anything, the one to two day breaks he’d taken from alcohol had only resulted in him hitting the bottle with renewed intensity.

But it’s different this time.

Now, he doesn’t have a choice, not if he wants to help Nero out. He’s Nero’s only source of blood, since Nero would rather die or starve himself for two thousand years than forcibly jump another human for it.

Besides, Dante somehow...doesn’t want Nero to drink anyone else’s blood, for whatever bizarre, fucked up reasoning he has. It’s not like he can lay claim to Nero’s appetite, but he wants to, anyway. The thought of Nero sinking his fangs into anyone that isn’t him is highly unsettling.

Nero doesn’t look very reassured, chewing at the inside of his cheek.

“You shouldn’t have to. Not for me. This is fucking stupid--I don’t even understand why it’s affecting me at all. I’m a _vampire_. Food and drink aren’t supposed to do anything to me.”

“Well, you aren’t supposed to be warm, either. At least I didn’t think so. Sorta remember you saying you didn’t give off body heat. And seems like it’s a little too soon for your symptoms to be popping up again.”

“I...don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

Nero looks down at his hands, idly curling and uncurling his fingers, his light blue eyes looking uncertain in a way that Dante doesn’t like. But he doesn’t know much more about this situation that Nero does, despite the amount of research that his brother put into demonic contracting.

Actually, Dante could probably find out. He still has all of his brothers books and notes stashed somewhere in a storage unit. He’d wanted to burn them, initially, had almost done it, but after he’d dumped them in a big pile and got the lighter, he couldn’t make himself drop it.

Vergil’s handwriting, splayed out over the various pages, was really all he had left to remember his brother by, along with the scar. And Dante has never been very good at letting go of this particular aspect of his life.

He’s not entirely certain how much information Vergil has collected on vampires, but his brother was always a bit of a nerd and a perfectionist at heart. He doubts that the man would have left a single stone unturned in his fervent quest for power.

So there’s a literal goldmine of information, sitting right there in the locked storage unit a couple of miles away. But of course, Dante can’t make himself go look. No matter how helpful it could be to him and Nero, no matter how it might wipe away the uncertainty and insecurity in Nero’s eyes, Dante is still too selfish to open it up.

Even if he didn’t want to go himself, even if he just gave Nero the key and let the kid go to town, doing so would still mean another person would have access to such a private part of his life.

And he can’t let that happen.

So instead, like the terrible person he is, he reaches out for one of Nero’s too-warm hands, flipping it over and tracing the wrist with a thumb. There’s still no pulse--Dante was half-expecting to find one, at this point--but even in the darkness of the room, he can tell that Nero’s skin has an unusual color to it, far less pale than usual.

“Maybe don’t worry about it, kid. You’re not in any pain or anything, are you?”

Nero’s hand tenses in his grip.

“I...no.”

It isn’t a lie. The kid is probably one of the worst liars that Dante’s ever seen, always getting especially fidgety and refusing to make eye contact when he does so. But there’s a hesitance in Nero’s voice that makes Dante uneasy, too.

They should really talk about it, but Dante’s headache is really starting to get the better of him, and the knowledge of what he’s about to have to do makes him want to fall asleep and not wake up so he won’t have to deal with it.

He’s going to have to do this by himself, with no medical or professional help. The shortest time frame at any inpatient rehab center is at least thirty days, and there’s no way he can leave Nero alone for that long. He can’t even get any sedatives for it, not unless he goes to a doctor, and Dante isn’t about to face some stranger and own up to the fact that he’s been an alcoholic for a decade.

“Hey,” he says out loud, squeezing Nero’s hand in his own, and the kid startles lightly, apparently having been lost in thoughts of his own. “I need you to promise me something, Nero.”

Nero looks wary, but nods, too trusting in Dante as usual.

“Not gonna lie, it’s probably going to be bad. Really bad. It was like this both times I tried to stop in the past, and back then, I hadn’t been drinking for as long or as much as I am now. And I’m not in my right mind when I try to stop.”

Dante doesn’t like the person that alcohol turns him into, but he likes who he is without it even less.

“So..no matter what I say or do to you, don’t give up on me, kid. And don’t let _me_ give up on me. If things start looking like they’re really going south, call Lady and Trish.”

The apprehensive look on Nero’s face only deepens, and Dante feels guilty for burdening him with this kind of thing, for making the kid shoulder a responsibility that is almost entirely Dante’s problem and Dante’s fault.

“...you still drunk, old man?” Nero finally asks, which is not at all what Dante had expected him to say.

Nero’s other hand comes up so that both of his hands are sandwiching Dante’s larger one.

“Don’t be stupid. I already said you’re stuck with me, didn’t I? And I’m stuck with you. Not about to give up on that after everything and waste both of our times. Besides...you’re fucking stubborn when you want to be. You can do it.”

Dante feels that Nero’s faith in him is sorely unfounded. Not even Lady and Trish think he’s capable of drying out, and they’re right to believe so. He’s been drinking nonstop for ten years, no longer knows how to face his problems or his life without the crutch that alcohol affords him.

But he’s never had anyone like Nero to help him out, either.

So maybe, Dante can allow himself to hope this time around.

He chuckles lightly, tilting his head down and catching the determined, trusting glint in the kid’s blue eyes.

“Thanks, kid.”

They sit in silence for a long moment before Dante finally pulls his hand away from Nero’s grasp and slowly lowers himself back down. He’ll need all the rest he can get before the real show starts.

Nero gets off of the bed, disappearing into the kitchen and coming back with a glass of water, putting it on the bedside table. Dante’s feeling a bit too nauseous to drink anything right about now, but he appreciates the gesture all the same.

Before he drifts back off to sleep, he feels Nero’s gentle fingers carding through his hair, fingertips brushing lightly against Dante’s scalp in a touch that he can’t help but lean into.

Then, in the quiet voice the kid is deliberately using to avoid irritating Dante’s headache any further, he hears,

“Sorry, Dante. For everything.”

Nero shouldn’t be sorry--Dante’s definitely not.

It’s about time he quit, anyway. Ever since meeting Nero, he’s had somewhat of a better understanding of responsibility is supposed to be like. Alcohol has dissolved most of his relationships that weren’t with Lady or Trish, and now he has this kid--he has another chance at having someone close to him in his life again.

He’d be stupid not to take this opportunity up.

Besides, the less money he spends on the alcohol, the more boxes of Nero’s favorite marshmallow cereal he can afford, which is definitely a bonus.

And maybe he can see Nero’s smile more, smiles free of alcoholic influence.

The thought is immediately so pleasant and warm that Dante doubts that there’s anything he’d stop at to get more of it.

But he’s too tired and his head is pounding, so he doesn’t convey any of this to Nero, merely sighs, relaxing further into the boy’s touch, and falls asleep.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s bearable, actually, until he starts seeing Vergil.

When he wakes up next, at eight in the evening, the alcohol has completely left his system, and there’s not much more to do than sit around and wait for the withdrawal symptoms to kick in. Nero calls his workplace again, tells them he’ll be out for a while, and Dante is pretty certain that he’s more than used up all of his vacation days at this point.

Nero crunches away nervously on his cereal and Dante sits at the kitchen table, staring idly into the glass of disgusting lemon water he’s been nursing for the past hour. Neither of them say anything, but there’s an odd, tense sort of apprehension hanging in the air between them.

Dante feels fine now, save for the muted remains of his headache lingering about in his skull, but he knows that in about six hours, he’ll be singing a different tune. He looks down at his hands, which haven’t started shaking yet, and takes another sip of the water, the sour taste stinging the back of his throat.

In the time that he was asleep, Nero has done his job well, has hunted down and disposed of any sort of alcohol left in Dante’s apartment, and somehow, stupidly, his home feels oddly empty without the knowledge of beer in the fridge or vodka in the cabinet.

But he’s grateful to the kid, definitely. He doubts he could have done it himself.

“I’m going back to bed,” he decides, pushing his chair back, and Nero gives him a look with no small amount of concern. Dante has slept more in this one day than he has in the past three.

Nero swallows down his marshmallows and grains and looks nervously between Dante and the bedroom door. He looks very much like he wants to say something, but eventually refrains.

Dante doesn’t have the energy left to keep prying, to figure out what it is that Nero wants to say, so he turns away and stumbles over to his bedroom door.

“Wait, Dante,” Nero starts, but seems to lose his confidence after Dante actually turns to look at him.

The kid struggles with himself for a second later, swirling his milk and marshmallows around with his spoon.

“Um. Sleep well, I guess.”

Dante gives the kid an offhand gesture, then retreats into his room, leaving the things that they both refuse to say laying between them.

The next day is considerably worse.

He can’t stop shaking, feeling impossibly cold underneath his layers of blankets. Nero comes to visit him several times, always looking down at him with increasing amounts of worry, but there’s nothing the kid can do to make this any better. There’s nothing that Dante himself can do, other than to have never become a shitty old drunk in the first place.

Dante tries to get the kid to stay out, because when he’s miserable, his words grow sharper and harsher and he always says things that he doesn’t mean, but Nero doesn’t seem to particularly care.

“How do you feel?” Nero asks, in what seems to Dante to be an absolutely useless question, because if he looks even a fraction as bad he feels, the answer should be obvious.

“I’m fine, kid,” he bites out, and Nero stays silent, looking over him with those baby blue eyes.

Dante should feel nice to be cared for in this way, but he can’t muster up anything but an irrational irritation, so he instead he just turns his head, staring at the wall next to him and wishing he could fast forward time past this moment.

“I think I should be alone.”

Dante doesn’t want to be alone. He doesn’t want to lock himself up in his bedroom and lay down on his cold bed. He wants to ask Nero to come with him, to lay next to him and put his head on his chest in that awfully endearing way of his, reminiscent of a tiny kitten. Maybe if Nero comes and puts his weight against his, Dante can stop trembling.

“Do you really?”

He clenches his teeth, a distant headache running behind his closed eyes.

“Yes.”

A part of him hopes that Nero will object, will implicitly understand what he wants without Dante having to say it, but maybe Dante has done his job a little too well, because, after a pause, the kid hops off of the bed.

“I’ll come back tomorrow morning,” he promises, and Dante supposes he can look forward to that, at least.

He lays in bed for the rest of the night, unable to sleep, insomnia rushing through his veins, and he thinks about how slow time seems to pass when he doesn’t sleep. There’s nothing to do and nothing he can do and he repeats it to himself over and over again.

When the sun peeks through the blinds of his room and he turns his head, Vergil is sitting at his bedside, legs crossed, idly flicking through the pages of the journal he always carried around.

“Hello, brother,” his twin greets him quietly, looking just as Dante remembers him, not a hair out of place.

It’s not real--Dante knows this isn’t real. Vergil is in maximum security prison, in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day, and has absolutely no means to be sitting inside of Dante’s apartment, lounging about on his bed.

He’s hallucinating, and he answers anyway because this is the only way he can ever talk to his brother anymore.

“Shut up, Verge.”

The nickname feels familiar, rolls off his tongue like a friendly memory, but his stomach twists sharply and his scar tingles with pain. He covers his bare abdomen with a hand, fingers tracing the mottled flesh of the not-quite healed skin.

“You haven’t answered my letters,” his brother says quietly, and Dante hears the hurt in his voice, because it’s the hurt he’s imagined to himself for over ten years. “Why is that, Dante? I raised you well--surely you know what the proper letter writing etiquette is?”

“Gee, I don’t know, brother. Maybe it’s because you stabbed me? Or because you killed about a hundred innocent people?”

“Poor justifications to ignore your only living blood relative,” Vergil shakes his head, icy cold voice snaking its way into Dante’s mind. “You, of all people, should understand the importance of family.”

Dante’s vision flashes red, and he seizes the nearest thing available to him--the glass of water that Nero had left on the bedroom table, and hurls it at his brother.

Nero comes running at the sound of the crash and finds Dante staring emptily at the wall to his right, water dripping slowly from a wet stain on the wall, shards of broken glass on the ground.

“Dante, what--?” Nero begins to ask, looking between him and the wall, but Dante is only looking at his brother, who sneers widely at him, reaching over and pressing his cold fingers against Dante’s skin. Dante feels the chills wracking his body grow stronger, skin prickling uncomfortably at the contact.

“Sorry,” Dante mumbles, even though it’s getting harder and harder to stay grounded in reality. “Was cleaning up a mess.”

The way Nero looks at him is terrible, filled with a fear that Dante doesn’t understand as the kid disappears into the kitchen, returning with a dustpan Dante didn’t even know he owned, silently picking up the pieces of the glass.

“Still needing someone to look after you?” Vergil asks him dryly. “Dependent on others as always, I see. Like a leech, you are.”

“Shut the hell up.”

Nero turns his head from where he’s kneeling on his bedroom carpet to look at him, his eyes flickering around the room as if trying to figure out who Dante is talking to. Dante would explain, but he doesn’t know how to--how can he tell Nero that Vergil is sitting right here when Nero barely even knows who his brother is?

“You, uh...you talking to someone, old man?” Nero sounds uneasy, and Dante settles for not answering at all, mostly because he doesn’t know what kind of answer to provide that will make the situation seem normal.

The kid clearly becomes antsy at Dante’s continued lack of response--or maybe it’s the way Dante stares absently ahead of him, eyes locked on his brother’s cold gaze--and he comes up to his bedside, laying a hand against Dante’s forehead.

His warm touch dispels Vergil’s own, and the illusion of his brother temporarily breaks, and Dante finds himself staring up into kind, ancient eyes.

“Tell me what I should do, Dante,” Nero requests softly, and Dante wishes he knew.

He shakes his head, trying to clear the blur from his vision, hoping to focus on the anchor of Nero’s face, but it’s too hard. Everything is pulling him in a hundred different directions, and in the end, Dante can only allow himself to be carried away by the flow.

“Just keep your promise.”

Whether Nero does or not, Dante has no way of knowing, because he’s very quickly starting to lose sense of where he is. He’s doing it again, he’s phasing in and out of reality and time, but it’s so much more vivid this time, and when he blinks, eyelids like lead weights pressed against his face, he’s eight years old.

He’s eight years old, and his parents are dead, and he’s crying into his brother’s arms, and Vergil tilts his head downwards, pressing his chapped lips against Dante’s forehead, tears of his own trickling into Dante’s white mop of hair.

“Sorry, Dante,” Eight-year-old Vergil says to him, his grip around Dante tightening, strangling the Dante of the present like a venomous snake. “Sorry, Dante. I’m so sorry.”

The man who delivered the news hands them a box, and Vergil takes it, his hands small against the frame of the wood, and when his brother opens it, the world shifts, twisting and spinning around him as eight-year-old Dante leans over and looks inside and--

“What the hell, grandpa?”

There’s a hand on his wrist, and Dante blinks, and blinks again, harder, and he’s looking down into his own medicine cabinet, his hands wrapped around a bottle of sleeping pills.

Right. He came here for this.

He dragged himself out of bed, ten minutes, ten months, ten weeks, ten years ago, because he couldn’t fall asleep, and he needed to fall asleep, and the only sensible solution was--

“This is a bad idea,” Nero says, from somewhere close to his ear, and Dante is particularly fond of ignoring him in this moment, hands twisting open the bottle with a light pop and shaking out two in his hands.

“I’m really tired,” Dante mumbles, as if that explains anything. “And I can’t sleep. What time is it?”

Nero tells him the answer, which Dante doesn’t hear, and his words are followed by more insistent tugging at his wrist as the kid tries to pry the pills away from Dante’s hands. He succeeds, for the most part, because Dante lets him, allows himself to be herded back into the bedroom and into the bed.

Dante is staring up at the ceiling, is flat on his back, sinking into the comforting material of his mattress.

The kid presses his hands against Dante’s chest, looking down at him.

“You’re really freaking me out here, old man,” Nero starts, and Dante attempts to listen, he really does, but he’s blinking, once, twice, and he’s laying on the floor, looking at the red of his own blood covering wooden floorboards, leaking into the white chalk of the sigil etched into the ground.

He reaches out, but the gap is too wide, and he’s left staring at his open palm as he feels weaker and weaker.

There’s a hand, it tangles with his own, and suddenly the memory is incorrect. His hand is no longer bloody, and his skin is clean and there’s no white chalk on the ground, only a boy sitting next to his head.

This is not what happened, and therefore he must not be in the past.

“Do you think I should call Lady and Trish?”

Lady and Trish. He knows the names, but doesn’t know the time, doesn’t know if he’s at the point in his past or present when he knows either of them.

Lady and Trish.

Dante is sliding out of his own bed into another, the deep red of his covers is bleached stark white, the smell of antiseptic smothering in the air around him. He’s laying in the hospital, and there are two women, they are Lady and Trish, they tell him they found him in the ruins of what used to be his apartment.

“We’re Devil Hunters,” the one with the guns strapped to her waist explains.

Eight-year-old Dante is looking into the box, looking at the gun with silver bullets left inside, and the man says that that’s the only thing their parents left behind, the rest of the bodies were gone, decimated, absorbed, disappeared, vanished into nonexistence.

That, and a necklace. Two necklaces, each with half of the pendant. Vergil takes one and he takes one and Vergil presses his half against Dante’s and tells him that they’ll be together forever, that he won’t let them be split apart.

“We’re looking for your brother--Vergil, I think. You feel like helping us?” The one with long blond hair proposes, her arms folded across her chest, her posture confident and eyes blazing with a deep determination.

She reminds Dante of his mother, she was a Devil Hunter too, she and his father both, and when Dante is eight years old and he and his brother finally stop crying, Vergil pulls him aside and asks if he knows why their parents died.

“No,” Dante responds, to three different people, in three different times. “I don’t.”

He feels fingers at his neck, then against his forehead, before Nero sighs out slowly above him.

“If you say so…”

Nero turns away, reaching for something on the nightstand, and Dante sees the turned back, sees the back of his brother’s head, and stretches his arm out, wrapping it around the wrist that could belong to any one of his memories.

“Are you leaving?” he murmurs.

Lady and Trish look back at him, sympathy and frustration warring across their features, but they need to catch his brother, can’t spend too much time standing around the bed of an invalid looking for answers that Dante can’t give.

“Sorry, Dante,” they tell him, then disappear through the door of his hospital room, closing it with a soft click.

They apologize to him, and his brother apologizes to him when Dante opens the door of his old apartment, the latch sliding open with a click, and Vergil is standing there, blade bloody in his hand, a little girl with blond locks lying at his feet, and Vergil looks up, ice blue eyes burning into his own.

“I’m sorry, Brother,” he sneers, his smile colder than the blood in Dante’s veins. “Would mind terribly leaving us alone?”

The arm that Dante is holding onto twists back to him.

“Sorry Dante,” whispers Nero, before settling back down next to him. “Didn’t know you wanted me stay.”

Nero curls up on him, and the weight reminds Dante of where he is, reminds him of which bed he’s lying on and who he’s talking to and the phantom faces of Trish and Lady and his brother in the terrible gap between eight and nineteen years old disappear for a blessed minute.

“I can’t sleep,” Dante says helplessly, trembling uncontrollably underneath the kid.

“Can’t sleep, little brother?” Vergil is asking him, his arms and face dotted with bruises from the hands of their foster parents. Dante should have them too, Dante is the one who broke the plate, but Vergil is older than him, always pushes him out the way, takes the blame for everything.

Even when it’s all Dante’s fault.

Everything is always Dante’s fault.

His eyes are heavy, and his body is sore, and he doesn’t know how long it’s been since he was last unconscious, but he can’t sleep. His body won’t let him, no matter how hard he tries, and he’s forced to lay awake, eyes plastered to his invisible hallucinations.

Nero doesn’t say anything, just brings his hand up to Dante’s own and twines their fingers together.

“I’ll stay awake with you,” Nero promises, and Dante doesn’t think he should believe in promises, but he made Nero make one before this all started, anyway, so maybe he trusts Nero a little bit more, just a bit above the rest.

Nero lies awake with him, aimlessly touching Dante’s hair, his face, his chest, the brushes of his fingers gently tugging Dante gently back into reality whenever he might drift off. His presence makes things tolerable, but the more that Dante lies there, the more certain he is that he needs to sleep.

Sometimes he shuts his eyes and sinks into darkness, but it’s not really sleeping, because he is always restless, sore eyes moving underneath his heavy eyelids, and his body won’t stop fucking trembling for even a second.

He needs to sleep.

He sits up on his own, his body knowing his purpose before his mind does, and to his right, he sees Vergil turn another page in his book, the corners of his lips twitching upwards in amusement.

“Wait, where are you headed, grandpa?” Nero reaches for him, wraps restraining hands around his shoulder and Dante shoves him away, but Nero keeps trying, Nero is persistent and stubborn like that.

“At least let me help you--don’t really think you’re in any condition to move on your own--”

“You won’t be able to move around freely for about three weeks,” says the doctor as Dante stares emptily up at the ceiling, sometime after Trish and Lady have left. “Your injuries were pretty bad. The explosion of the building did most of the damage, but it’ll heal over. Your stab wound, though...you might have a scar.”

He does have a scar.

He still has a scar, ten years later, on the inside and out, and he sees it and Nero’s seen it and across the room, Vergil sees it, his hooded eyes narrowing in lazy amusement at his handiwork.

“It’s a good look for you, Brother.”

Dante growls, gritting his teeth and glaring at the illusion. Vergil is always doing this, is always holding him back, even ten years later, because Dante can’t forget what he’s done no matter what, and now can’t even sleep because Vergil keeps _fucking talking in his ear._

Vergil shuts his book and gracefully stands up, stalking over to him, wrapping his hand around Dante’s arm, his touch like ice.

“Shut up,” Dante says out loud.

“Leave me the _fuck_ alone!”

The grip on his arm tightens in response, and Dante suddenly finds a strength he hadn’t realized he’d possessed and puts one hand against Vergil’s chest--strangely too small and leaner than he remembers--and wraps the other around the wrist at his arm and practically throws the weight off of him.

The startled yelp that follows cuts through Dante’s hazy senses, and Vergil is gone, and he’s looking down at Nero instead, who is sprawled out on the floor next to the bed, his back against the wall, his left wrist cradled close to his chest.

Nero is looking at him with wide blue eyes, the hurt obvious in them.

Dante’s mouth tastes like ash, and he wants to start forward, but Nero’s blue eyes are framed by long blonde hair, Nero is an innocent face looking up at him, a death he could have prevented, but instead caused, and Dante can’t go near anymore, can’t bring himself to look.

He stands up from the bed and stumbles through the door of his bedroom, the sharp light from the kitchen stinging his tired eyes after lying awake in the dark room for so long.

Nero isn’t following him, is probably keeping his distance from Dante, who does nothing but hurt other people, and it’s probably for the best. Dante yanks open the drawer of his medicine cabinet, unearths the little white tablets he has left over from his sleepless nights of Vergil’s trial, counting them out in his hand.

There are too many in his palm, but the more there are, the faster he can fall asleep.

Or so he tells himself.

Nero scrambles up from behind him as Dante swallows them down, feeling them crawl down his throat with reassuring consistency, falling one by one into his body. He can sleep--they’ll put him to sleep, and he won’t have to look at Vergil or Lady or Trish or the little girl with blond curls whose name he only found out after she was dead and her body had been fished out of the ruins of his apartment and wrapped up in a white sheet.

“It’s a miracle that you survived,” they told Dante, patting him on the arms and back. “Lucky you.”

Lucky him. Lucky, lucky him, that Vergil, for whatever reason, had chosen to spare him from death. Lucky him that his memories will never leave him alone, that he can’t sleep because he spent eleven years of his life in a dream, pretending he didn’t see what Vergil was becoming.

“Dante, what the hell did you just do?” Nero demands, an obvious fear creeping up in his voice, and he grabs Dante’s wrist, looks between the empty bottle and Dante’s palm, mentally counting out how many tablets there had been in his mind.

“I’m going back to bed,” Dante answers, feeling oddly calm.

Nero lets him go and Dante can hear, through the thin walls, the sound of him talking. He hears the names again, Lady and Trish, Trish and Lady, but Dante’s world doesn’t shift anymore. He doesn’t go back to the hospital bed, stays in his own mind, in his own present, which is more of a relief than anything.

He turns his head on his pillow and meets Vergil’s blue eyes, giving him a lazy wave.

“See you never, Verge,” he mumbles happily, his eyes slipping shut, feeling at long last the tug of unconsciousness in the folds of his mind.

The world spins again, for what has to be the final, last time--there are no more memories after this, and he’s back in the doorway of his old apartment.

“Do you know why our parents died?” Eight-year-old Vergil whispers to him, and Dante shakes his head, because no, he doesn’t.

“They were too weak,” says the present and the past Vergil. “But not me. I’ll be strong.”

He tilts the blade in his hand, angles it just so that Dante can see what he’s about to do, can see the way he’ll bring it down on the girl at his feet, about to make the sacrifice necessary to summon and contract a demon.

Dante darts forward, grabbing his brother’s arm, and they struggle, and they fight, and Dante is yelling and Vergil is snarling at him, and Dante maybe finally says the right thing, because his brother goes limp underneath him, stops fighting him, lowers his blade.

“We can still fix this, Verge. I promise you.”

Dante doesn’t believe in promises. But he did back then. And he thinks that Vergil does, too, because he relaxes, his eyes soften.

“Dante…”

Dante turns away, kneels down next to the unconscious girl, checks her pulse--

And his blood splatters onto the wooden floorboards as Vergil runs his blade through him.

“Give up, Brother,” Vergil tells him, his black boots shiny with Dante’s blood. “If you want to spare the girl, so be it. But I still require a sacrifice for the contract. Give it up. Give up your life, for a cause far nobler than your own.”

Give it up.

Dante wants to give up.

He’s so sleepy, lying on this floor. Or lying on this bed.

His eyes flutter shut--or maybe they were already closed all along. Dante doesn’t think he knows anymore. He’s tired, too tired to separate dream from the reality, and maybe he’ll lie here on the floor at Vergil’s feet forever, watching as his blood seeps into the center of the summoning circle and his vision floods with bright blue light.

It’s too much.

Dante wants to sleep.

There’s a sharp, piercing pain in his neck, hard enough for Dante’s eyes to fly open, and the blood isn’t just in his memories, it’s in his reality, too, his hands are covered in it, Nero’s mouth is covered in it.

“You think this will really work?” Trish’s voice--when did she get here? Or was her memory here all along?--floats in from next to his right.

“We have to try. It’s all we can do before the ambulance shows up. I can’t believe that old bastard really…” Lady mutters, her fingers against his wrist, trying to measure his slowing pulse.

He wants to push the kid away, but his limbs won’t move, are heavier than the concrete and wood rubble of his apartment on top of him, and Dante’s eyes roll back into his head as he slips underneath the haze of consciousness again.

 _Give it up, Brother. Give it up_ , Vergil whispers to him, then orders him, because Vergil is looming above him again, and Dante’s face is pressed against his wooden floor.

He reaches out, but the gap is too wide.

It’s always been too wide, every time, too far for Dante to cross.

So if it’s impossible, why does Dante try?

“Hey, you piece of shit!”

Dante lifts his head, and the memory of his world halts around him. His blood stops spreading across the white lines of chalk on the ground, and Vergil is frozen above him, his face still twisted into cold lines of little emotion.

There are blue eyes and white hair in front of him, and then Dante is being pushed upwards, maneuvered into a sitting position against the wall, and there’s a kid kneeling in front of him.

Dante knows his name, knows the blue eyes, but that’s at a point in the future. The Dante of now, the Dante of this memory does not know this boy, no matter how familiar he may seem to be.

“Didn’t I fucking tell you I wasn’t letting you just run out of this? You’re not giving up that easily, and I’m not fucking giving up on you!” The kid snarls at him, then stands up, surveying the area around him.

“So your head is just as fucked up as mine. So what? Get the fuck up and deal with it! You still have a job to finish, and a life to keep living, and I still have a promise to you to keep--so get up already, old man.”

The kid extends a hand to him, the expression on his face both mildly impatient and irritated, but underneath that, Dante can see the shadow of a smile, of two fangs poking out from underneath full lips.

It’s a trivial thought, actually. Compared to everything that’s around him, it’s ridiculous for Dante to be thinking of this.

But a fragment of memory, a scrap from some point, ten years in his future comes back to him, and he remembers--

_He wants to kiss that smile, if he’s honest with himself._

Dante reaches out, eyes following the motion of his surprisingly steady hands, and takes the kid’s firm grasp in his own. The kid's hand is smaller than his, feels right in his own, and the contact is natural and pleasant. It feels like Dante has finally come home, after a long day spent outside. 

He lets the kid pull him upwards, out of the memory.

And Dante, after an entire life spent sleepwalking, finally wakes up.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwaw i'm sorry this chap took such a long time HDSFAHSFASHFAS   
> anyway i thought it was gonna b fluffy, breather chapter but............................i blame the smeg fiends on dn twitter for filling me up w/ righteous vengeance   
> ty 2 luna for listening 2 my madman ranting  
> TW for past child abuse, vomiting, drug overdose

“Dante, what did you do?”

Dante is standing in the kitchen, his bare feet cold against the dirty tiles, looking down at the shards of the plate that he broke. There’s a hand around his wrist, cold and small, and when he looks up, his brother is staring at him, his face impassive but the fear clear in his ice blue eyes. 

“Verge, I…”

Vergil ignores him, kneeling against the floor and starting to sweep up the biggest pieces, eyes flickering frantically around the room for a place to hide the evidence of Dante’s crime. Dante should help, should be the one taking care of this in the first place, because it’s fault--he was  _ hungry _ , when he really shouldn’t have been. 

His brother wasn’t hungry, even though he’d given half of his part of yesterday’s dinner to Dante when their foster parents hadn’t been looking, but Dante is never satisfied with what he gets, always needs more. 

“Don’t say anything, Dante,” his brother warns him, a layer of firm ice underneath his words, but Dante can hear the slight tremble in them, can see the way that his brother bites at his lip and turns his gaze to the floor, fingers shaking against the shards of plate.

His brother is trying to be strong for him, is putting up a front like he always does.

Vergil is only a few minutes older than him, but is so much stronger than him, acts older than him in a way that Dante can’t understand. His twin has such strength, strength that Dante can’t recognize in himself when he looks into his face in the mirror.

“But, I...I’m sorry--”

He stumbles over his own words, isn’t very good at talking when he’s being choked by fear, and presses his hands uncertainly against his chest. Vergil sighs out, standing up again and instead putting his hands on Dante’s shoulders, eyes hardening like steel.

“Remember what I say about apologies.”

But Dante tries anyway, grips at the amulet around his neck nervously, words trying to tumble out of his tightening throat, when the sound of the slamming front door makes both of them jump. Their heads instantly twist towards the source of the sound, and Vergil releases Dante’s shoulders, positioning himself so that he’s standing part of the way in front of him.

“You should go,” Vergil tells him, his voice flat, for the most part unemotional, save for the undercurrent of fear within it. “Go back to our room.”

Dante forces his feet to move, stumbles backward and tries to avoid cutting himself against the sharper, smaller shards still scattered around the floor. He stares hard at Vergil’s back, but his brother never turns around, determinedly looking ahead at the kitchen entrance, his nails digging into his palms. 

He ducks outside of the room and scrambles up the stairs, but the walls are thin, and he’s not far away enough not to hear the fury in his foster father’s voice.

“Did you do this,  _ boy?”  _

There’s a long pause, in which Dante does his best to memorize the image of his brother before it inevitably becomes marred by bruises.

“I was hungry,” he hears Vergil snap, and Dante feels his own empty stomach twist painfully in response. “You don’t feed us enough--you seem to be laboring underneath the delusion that one meal a day is enough for a pair of ten-year-old twins.”

“So you broke the plate.”

“So I did.”

Dante flinches, covers his ears with his hands, but fails to muffle the sound of his brother’s yelp of pain, of the sound of skin against skin, echoing again and again until Dante forces himself up the last of the stairs and into his shared room with his brother. He buries himself into his covers, staring at the sickly yellow of the peeling paint on the walls, counting out the too-long minutes until his brother returns.

He doesn’t, even when the natural light of the sun starts to dissipate and the room grows dark.

Maybe Dante falls asleep, because the next thing that he’s aware of is the door opening with a quiet click. He holds his breath, shutting his eyes tightly, but there’s only the soft noise of the door tapping against the frame as his brother closes it behind him.

“Verge?” Dante croaks out, twisting in his bed to look at his brother.

There’s angry red welt on Vergil’s cheek, bruises dotting the exposed skin of his wrists, and Dante knows that if he pushes up the sleeve of his brother’s jacket, he’ll find more. His brother limps over to his side of the bed and sits down, moving as carefully as possible.

“Can’t sleep, little brother?”

Dante feels the tears sting at his eyes as he pushes himself up and reaches out for his brother, but doesn’t touch, too afraid to accidentally brush against a bruise or cut.

“No tears, Dante,” Vergil says, his gaze flickering over to meet Dante’s own.

His twin twists himself around so that he’s facing the other, and Dante sees, within the depths of Vergil’s ice blue eyes, something cold and unfathomable, something that Dante doesn’t quite like.

“Crying won’t solve anything. So don’t do it. The same with apologies.”

His brother always does this, always packs away the worst of his emotions into tiny boxes, pretends like he doesn’t feel them, because if he lets himself feel them, he’ll start to care. Vergil told him, once, that caring about something was the worst pain he’d ever felt.

“This is just how it is,” Vergil continues, pulling his sleeves down over his wrists, watching the bruises disappear underneath the fabric. “Those who have power will always use it--as is natural for the arrangement of life. If you are weak, the only solution is to get stronger, strong enough so that no one can ever touch you again.”

Dante doesn’t like the way his brother sounds in this moment, the way that Vergil feels so far away, like they’re standing on opposite sides of a deepening chasm, and he’s watching his brother’s turned back grow increasingly distant from him.

“But…” Dante trails off, scrubbing furiously at his face. “I broke the plate. It’s my fault.”

Vergil shakes his head, his eyes losing some of that burning intensity that makes Dante so uneasy, his face softening as he looks over his brother.

“No. It’s not your fault.”

_ I know, Vergil. _

It’s taken Dante about two decades, a shitload of alcohol, and an angry, fluffy vampire’s furious tirade at him, but Dante now knows.

He thinks about this, replaying the memory over and over again in his mind as he floats through a sea of half-consciousness. It’s odd--the familiar, bitter sting that usually accompanies his Vergil-related memories is, for one reason or another, absent. 

He’s still seeing his ten-year-old self, still looking into Vergil’s eyes and realizing the start of the person that Vergil would become, but this is the side of his brother that he’s never been able to let go. He’s never been able to look past the way his brother always looked out for him, and he’s never been able to forgive himself for it.

But it’s not his fault.

Not everything is his fault, and Dante is slowly learning this.

So he allows himself to keep poking around in his own mind, lets himself go back over and over again as he hovers on the precipice of waking up, but isn’t quite able to break free into true awareness.

Sometimes, if he concentrates hard, voices on the outside fade in and out. There’s a woman there--Lady, he thinks--talking a man that Dante doesn’t know. It’s always Lady’s voice, is only ever hers, and Dante feels oddly like he’s missing a part of himself.

Whenever he tries to think harder on it, tries to figure out who or what should be there and isn’t, a fresh wave of exhaustion sweeps over him, and Dante is forced to give up, retreating back into the well of darkness once more. There’s not much to do, in this state of half-sleep of his, so he keeps thinking, keeps going back over his memories again and again.

But that’s alright. He isn’t in a rush--he’s already been woken up, really. At this point, it’s just a matter of time, waiting for the rest of his body to catch up with his mind. 

The space he’s in is timeless, safe and patient, so Dante isn’t quite sure when he becomes aware of the steady beeping somewhere to his right. It’s a low, droning noise, constant and slow, lining up with the fluttering beats of his heart, and Dante finds that it helps if he focuses on it.

He feels a little more aware, a little more awake with each beep that goes by, and he imagines himself walking down a line in front of him, passing checkpoints with every second, slowly making his way to the end.

“Dante?” He hears his own name, said in Lady’s voice. Her words are softer, gentler than he’s used to, and there’s the light touch of her skin against his as her fingertips trail against his forehead, then press against his hand.

“You finally awake?”

Is he?

His body is still awfully heavy, even if his mind and heart are finally light, and his eyelids feel heavy, like it’ll take the rest of his life to open them. But the way she asks him the question is certainly indicative of something--perhaps it is time for him to come back, after all.

His world narrows down to a single point, focuses on the contact that his hand has with hers, and he tries to grab onto the thought like a lifeline, pulling himself upwards. He remembers another hand, a little larger than Lady’s, but with equally slender fingers, wrapping around his, the grip tight and insistent.

_ Get up already, old man. _

“It’s only been about a day and a half. For him to be still asleep after everything his body’s gone through is not quite abnormal. But his body  _ is  _ showing signs of surprisingly accelerated healing. So, maybe…”

Well. Sounds like a challenge. And Dante’s never been one to back down. 

He forces himself awake, pushing open his heavy eyelids too quickly and too soon, groaning as the harsh fluorescent lights sting against his blurry vision, sensitive from days of disuse. The two figures in front of him jolt in surprise, turning to look down at him.

Lady chuckles wryly, coming up to the side of his bed and pressing a hand against his face, and he can feel the relief in her motions as she stares down at him with mismatched eyes, a smile spreading over her face.

“Couldn’t resist the opportunity to show someone up, could you?” 

She shakes her head down at him as the doctor makes his way to the other side, his pen scratching against paper as he scribbles down his various notes about Dante’s vitals, fiddling with the machines that Dante’s still connected to.

“Guess not,” Dante croaks, wincing at the way his voice scratches against his hoarse throat, swallowing against the dryness of his mouth. He turns his head, glancing around the rest of the room, but it’s empty, save for the two occupants around his bed.

“Awfully sparse for a homecoming party, isn’t it?” He murmurs out, something like a slow, distant realization building in the back of his mind, a feeling that only deepens when he sees the way that Lady presses her lips together in a thin line, her nails digging into her palms at her sides.

“Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Dante--”

The doctor cuts in, hovering over him and forcing his attention to focus on the man’s face. With a press of a button, Dante finds his bed being angled upwards, maneuvering him into a sort of half-upright semi-sitting position so that the doctor can get a better look at his physical condition. 

Dante finds himself being gently prodded at with cold fingers and even colder medical tools, a thoroughly unpleasant, but necessary procedure. Perhaps he’s a little biased--he’s always hated doctors, even as a little kid, and even more so after he’d woken up with a stab wound in his side and a permanent piece of himself carved out of his flesh.

The doctor makes a noise of confusion, and Dante raises an eyebrow, laying his head back into the pillows.

“What is it? Find anything weird?” He asks, hoping he looks more casual than he appears. He doesn’t know how much the doctor knows, or how much Lady told him when Dante had been admitted into the hospital in the first place, and the last thing he wants is for the doctor to lock him up in a psych ward for what he’s done to himself.

“Somewhat. Strange, but not necessarily bad.” 

The doctor leans back before Dante can ask what he means, flipping through his notes to what appears to be the beginning of the history of his most recent hospital stay.

“You’re healthy, extraordinarily so. When you were admitted, you were in shock, and suffering from both delirium and a good amount of blood loss, despite the fact that we could find no evidence of physical lacerations upon your person.”

Dante’s hand immediately strays to his neck, running his fingers over the skin, but the area is as clean and unblemished as usual. He does his best to pass the sudden gesture off as a nervous habit, which isn’t too hard to achieve, not with the real sensation of fear starting to twist in his gut.

“But now, everything is normal. From what I can tell, you were here about ten years ago, with a stab wound that took about three weeks to properly heal. The difference is...staggering, to say in the least. You must be a lucky man, Mr. Dante.”

His scar twinges with phantom pain at the memory of the last time he’d spent here, of the hours he’d spent staring up at the ceiling with empty eyes, wishing he could feel nothing, remembering that Vergil had told him that caring about something was the worst pain he’d ever felt.

Lucky Dante. Lucky, lucky him.

“I don’t know why it’s like this,” Dante forces himself to say, once he properly locates his voice within the sea of churning emotion within him and manages to pluck it out. “Guess I really am lucky.”

The doctor goes on and Dante frowns, fiddling with the plastic wristband wrapped around his forearm. There’s no mention of the sleeping pills that have to have been in his system, no inquiries about his mental wellbeing, no implicit suggestions towards getting himself a psychological evaluation.

It makes no sense.

They’d asked him all this shit last time, had thought he’d been trying to kill himself, that he’d maybe rammed a sword through his own gut and blown up his apartment and killed an innocent little girl for fun. And he’d let them think that, he’d laid in bed and refused to answer any of their questions for the longest time, because believing in the lie that they told him was easier than thinking about the truth.

It hadn’t been until Lady and Trish had arrived at his hospital bed, with determination in their stances and questions in their eyes, that he’d finally given him. They’d told him that Vergil was currently on the run and wreaking havoc with his newfound powers, having evidently forged the ultimate contract with generous helpings of Dante’s blood, and they needed his help. 

He’d turned them away, but by the end of the week, he’d been begging them to let him help them.

It’s not one of Dante’s proudest moments, and he knows how fucked up he was back then, how unhinged he must have seemed to everyone around him, but even that should pale in comparison to the shitload of sleeping pills he took. 

He remembers the pills sitting in his hand, little doses of relief that he’d crammed in all at once because he’d been too afraid to allow Vergil to hang around any longer, had been running from his past and had been so terrified that it might catch up with him. There were ten, eleven, twelve, maybe more--enough to put even a man of his considerable size into his final sleep.

And he’d been checked in, put under observation, shot up full of IV fluids and medication, and wasn’t even going to be asked about it once?

It’s a small blessing, despite how completely wrong it all is, and Dante allows the doctor to continue looking him over, nodding perfunctorily at the doctor’s affirmative statements and throwing out one or two cursory answers whenever he’s asked a mundane question.

“We’ll have to keep you under an observation period of at least another 24 hours. But since everything seems fine for now, if no other issues present themselves during that time, you should be free to go.”

Dante makes a numb sound of agreement, and thinks he must look normal enough to be believed, because the doctor nods once, then turns on his heel and leaves the room, the door sliding shut behind him.

“Lady,” Dante begins, the instant that the two of them are alone in the room, and she looks at him slowly, almost hesitantly. 

Neither of the girls tend to mince their words or soften their blows around him, and the gesture puts Dante immediately on edge, the bad feeling brewing in his stomach solidifying into a full-blown fact.

“How am I alive?” 

His voice rings out hollowly against his own ears, and he feels like he’s watching a car crash in slow motion, a tragedy that he already knows the end to, and he’d close his eyes if he could force himself to look away.

She takes in a deep breath, settling herself in one of the uncomfortable looking chairs by Dante’s bedside, fiddling with the sleeve of her shirt, tugging at one of the fraying threads at the ends of her cuffs.

“We got a call from the kid, about four days into your detox. Told us that you’d taken a lot of some kind of sleeping pill and that he wasn’t fast enough to stop you. Didn’t know how many you swallowed, but he said that you’d gone to sleep and you wouldn’t wake up. Of course, we drove over as fast as we could, but…”

Lady shakes her head, more to herself than anything, and Dante swallows torn between his impatience to hear the rest and his own self-preservation instincts.

Four days. Dante had lost all track of time while he’d been floating around in his own head, lost in his structureless daze, and the whole time, Nero had sat by his side, cleaning up after him, taking care of him, promising to stay awake with him, and Dante hadn’t even known.

“It wasn’t...good when we got there. You were barely breathing, and your heartbeat was so slow...Trish and I called the hospital.” 

They’d called the hospital, and then they’d waited. They’d sat by his slowly dying body, watching as his skin lost its color and heat, praying that he’d make it out alive, because that was what they should have done, was all they could have done.

But Nero is different. Dante knows the kid pretty well at this point, and, for all his talk about treasuring human life, Nero is astonishingly eager to throw away his own life, human or undead, in exchange for whatever he believes to be the greater good. 

And Dante is Nero’s worst fear come true, another person that Nero has come to know and trust and grow close to, driven to the precipice of death, and by his own hand, even.

Nero wouldn’t have been able to just sit by and wait.

Dante rubs at his neck again, shutting his eyes and falling back against the pillows, which Lady evidently takes to understand what Dante has long since realized.

“Nero was pretty hysterical. We tried to stop him, but...he used his hypnosis on us and everything. By the time Trish and I were able to move again, Nero was already on you, and the sleeping pills had already been dissolved into your blood. He had to take so much from you, to get all of it out, but...you lived.”

He lived. Dante’s life is built on the sacrifices of other people, the ones he cares about always lining up to take the fall for the consequences of his mistakes. 

“Where’s the kid now?” He says instead, staring up at the ceiling, feeling his heart pound painfully against his ribcage. “You didn’t--?”

“Trish is with him. She’s been giving me updates. But it…” Lady pauses here, looks down at her lap, and Dante is alarmed to see the pain he feels reflected in her own mismatched eyes.

Despite everything, she’s come to care about Nero, she and Trish both, because Nero is just so damn good at worming his way into people’s hearts, whether he means to or not. 

“He’s been asleep this entire time,” she finally says, her voice careful, like she’s stepping around a field of landmines. “We’ve been doing what we can to try and purge the sleeping pills from his system, but…”

Dante understands. Nero’s already told him how it is, how vampires have neither functioning metabolisms nor working digestive systems. Whatever human food Nero eats just dissolves into his undead body. And whatever can’t be dissolved--like a dose of sleeping pills lethal for a person about twice Nero’s body weight, for instance--only has one way out.

He thinks about Nero, choking up his own golden blood, his physical vessel rejecting his own vampiric soul and punishing him for it.

“So you’re starving him on purpose. Hoping he’ll puke it out?”

Dante’s voice is flat, free of emotion, guilt settling in his stomach like a heavy weight. He’s already seen Nero in that state once, looked into the kid’s cloudy blue eyes and at his pale face and had promised that he’d never let it get to that point again.

“It’s...the best we can do,” Lady admits. “We don’t know enough about him or about vampires in general to figure out any other way. And the longer he stays asleep...we have to keep waking him up. Or eventually, he might not ever.”

It’s what Dante wanted for himself, now reflected in the body of a nineteen-year-old kid. Maybe Nero wants this for himself too, in all honesty. He imagines Nero, the way the kid so obviously and without hesitation stacks Dante’s life so far above his own.

_ I don’t want to live like this, _ Nero had told him. 

But he hadn’t wanted to die, either.

The boy is stuck, trapped between two paradoxes tugging him in separate directions. And until he can decide on a direction that he wants to go, it’s Dante’s job to keep him safely in the middle.

“Don’t blame yourself, Dante,” Lady starts to say, and Dante covers his face with a hand, trying to suck in a shaky breath.

He’s trying not to. He’s trying so, so hard, because Vergil had tried to get him to understand it, and Nero had tried, and no matter how hard either of them try, it won’t ever get through unless Dante tries it himself. 

_ It’s not your fault, Dante. _

“I’m...not.”

_ So what? Get the fuck up and deal with it!  _

She looks at him, likely in disbelief, and he tries again, lowering his hand and clenching them against his lap. 

“I get it. The kid made his choice--a stupid one--but he made it anyway. That was what he wanted to do, on my behalf. And now all I can do is deal with what’s left. But I can’t change what I’ve already done.”

Lady looks as surprised as Dante feels, but as soon as the words leave his mouth, he knows they’re right. 

“So...what are you saying?”

Ten years ago, he laid awake in this hospital and stared at the ceiling while Vergil ran free outside, killing innocents on the end of his blade. Endless lives that Dante could have saved, had he not spent so long in the confines of his own shame and guilt. He’d come to his senses eventually, had helped Lady and Trish take down his own brother, and had been the decisive testimony that landed Vergil in a lifetime of jail.

But Dante will never get that time that he lost, those days he spent in a waking nightmare and refusing to come to terms with his reality back. But he can’t sleep any more--Nero’s already proven that to him.

“I’m saying,” he begins, and looks down at his own hands. 

These are the hands that repaid Nero’s kindness by throwing the kid into the wall, the hands that had shaken out the pills and had thought they could measure out the rest of his life out in tenuous confidence, the hands that had reached out for Nero’s own and allowed the kid to wake him up, in every sense of the word. 

“I’m going to fix this.”

 

* * *

 

Dante is a model patient for the rest of his brief stay in the hospital, allowing the doctors to poke and prod at him, eating his bland hospital food without a single complaint or even a request for pizza. He answers the rest of the questions thrown his way with genuine sincerity, pretends to be giving thought to the mandatory lecture about the dangers of alcohol, even as he knows that he’ll be going clean for good.

He’d come off of it because he’d owed it to Nero--but now he owes it to himself, even if they ever reach a point where Nero no longer needs him, to keep on the straight and narrow. 

He’s tired of losing time, whether to his past or to an inebriated present.

Twenty-four hours later, he leaves the hospital, discharge papers in hand as he piles into  the passenger seat of Lady’s car.

“Stop by at the grocery store, will you?” He requests, as they pull out of the hospital parking lot. 

They’ve been receiving regular texts from Trish, and Nero’s prognosis looks increasingly grim with every passing day. They can’t take the kid to a hospital--they’d figure out his vampiric status in under a minute, tops, and call in the devil hunters to finish the job before the sleeping pills could. 

But the drugs in Nero’s system, combined with the preexisting symptoms of his blood withdrawal are wreaking havoc on Nero’s body, and the kid spends most of his time in a feverish delirium, in too much pain to fully sleep, but unable to completely wake up without external help.

Trish has managed to get him upright for a good five minutes at a time, maybe more, but the effort exhausts Nero so greatly and puts him in so much pain that she doesn’t do it often.

Dante has been turning over the problem in his mind during his entire stay in the hospital, and he knows what Trish and Lady don’t. Or what they might not want to believe.

At the rate that things are going, Nero will die of starvation, slowly, painfully, and horribly, before the drugs can end his life. Neither way is very pleasant for the kid to go, and to Dante, there’s only one solution.

Lady gives him a strange look but obeys his request anyway, and Dante reminds himself to buy her an extra large Christmas gift--it’s already early October, after all, and the girls got pretty pissy at him when he’d gifted them nothing but an extra large box of pizza.

In Dante’s defense, he’d have been thrilled to receive that kind of gift.

They don’t say anything about his purchases at the store, merely bag it up with a few worried looks sent in his direction, but he plays it off with an easy smile, scooping up his newly acquired assets with one arm and waving charmingly at the young lady at the cash register with the other.

Lady looks like she might interrogate him, but Dante merely shakes his head. 

It’s better if neither Lady or Trish know what he’s planning--if he were in their shoes, he’d certainly stop himself.

But he can’t do nothing. Nero didn’t wait--Dante knows that the kid must have known how much blood he’d have to take, how greatly he was risking Dante’s life by choosing to remove the drugs from his body, and hadn’t been afraid to make the decision anyway.

When he enters his own apartment again, seeing it clearly for the first time in almost a week, he feels like a stranger in his own home. 

Trish is sitting on his couch, her face more pale and her eyes more tired than he’s ever seen them, and he winces internally. Nero shouldn’t have been the girls’ responsibility, no matter how much they cared about the kid. 

Dante is the one bonded to Nero, is the one who needs to shoulder the burden of both of their actions.

“Hey, Trish,” he greets, trying to keep his voice steady, but it’s no secret how he keeps looking towards the closed door of his bedroom where Nero must be. “The kid in there?”

She rubs at her eyes, rolling her head back and following his gaze towards the door, giving him a tired sort of gesture. 

“Yeah. Good to see you up, Dante,” she adds in, the slight relief in her voice apparent to all occupants of the room.

Lady joins her girlfriend on the couch, pressing her face into Trish’s shoulder, and the taller of the two wraps a gentle arm around her waist, seeking comfort in the physical touch. Dante watches them for a long moment, glad that their eyes aren’t on him as he rinses out a glass in the sink and fills it up.

“When’d you last wake him up?” He forces his tone to remain level, even as the glass feels increasingly heavy in his hand, and his heart pounds uncomfortably against his  chest. He steels his own nerves, reminding himself of the time he’s lost and the responsibility he now has.

“About an hour ago. He’s due for another, but I assume you want to do it?” 

The girls are surprised at how well he appears to be taking all this, and it shows in their faces, in the way that they continue to tiptoe around him, like they’re dealing with a potentially rabid animal. They’re probably right--the last time Nero had been sick, he hadn’t exactly acted in the most rational of ways.

What he’s doing now can’t be considered rational by any means, either. But it’s necessary.

Nero is dying, and as long as Nero continues to assert his wishes against death, Dante will protect him from it.

He heads into the bedroom without another word, and, despite how much he’s forced his heart to harden, it doesn’t make seeing Nero’s limp, pale form strewn out across the bed any easier.

The kid is fidgeting restlessly in his forced sleep, eyes shifting beneath his closed lids, murmuring weakly to himself as his mind burns from fever. Dante reaches out with a careful hand and brushes the kid’s bangs, damp with sweat and tears, away from his forehead.

“Hey, Nero?” He gently shakes the kid with a hand on his trembling shoulder, setting the glass down on the nearby table. “You want to wake up yet?”

At the sound of his voice, the kid stirs, his eyes cracking hazily open, and Dante can see the exhaustion in them, despite the fact that Nero’s been in an on-and-off sleep for a good 72 hours at this point. The blue in the boy’s irises is almost nonexistent, blotted out by the dark black of his dilated pupils, and it takes so long for Nero to focus his gaze on Dante’s face that it feels like the kid doesn’t see him at all.

“...Dante?” Nero whispers, his voice cracked and broken and Dante bows his head, pressing just a little harder down on the kid, ignoring the sharp sting that threatens to prick at his own eyes.

“Yeah. It’s me. I’m here. Sorry I took so long to get back to you, Nero.”

Nero stares up at him for a long, long moment, before his mouth curls up into a little half smile, an expression of relief crossing over his face. Dante doesn’t deserve to be looked at like this, doesn’t deserve the kindness and devotion that he sees in the kid’s eyes, but Nero has chosen to give them to him, anyway.

“Good...it worked. Was afraid...I’d killed you.”

He’s already losing Nero, he can tell, can see the way the kid’s focus is sliding out of reality, the way his eyes flutter as Nero fights to stay awake, and Dante sighs out, lead settling in his stomach as his resolve settles in his soul.

“Far from it. Don’t go to sleep yet, kid. I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything,” the kid answers, without even a hint of hesitation in his voice.

Dante can’t hesitate, either. 

He pulls back the covers, scooping Nero up as gently as he can, gaze darkening at the way that Nero so limply follows the momentum of his motions, laying limply against Dante’s hold. With the kid secured carefully in his arms, he makes his way to the connected bathroom in his bedroom, setting him back down on the tile floors.

Then, he retrieves the glass from the nightstand, and cradles Nero as best as he can, propping the kid up in a semi-upright position.

“Think you can drink this for me?”

Nero’s eyes narrow, and his gaze drifts to Dante’s face. The kid is sharp as ever, of course.

“What...is it?”

“A solution. With the way things are going...you might not make it. So this is a special kind of medicine. It’ll make you throw up--a lot. And you’ll have to keep drinking it, until we get all the shit cleaned out of your system. But it’ll save your life. Do you trust me?”

Dante wouldn’t, if he were Nero. He wouldn’t blame the kid if he told Dante to fuck off. But Nero only exhales, his already limp form growing steadily weaker with the motion as he relaxes against Dante.

“Always did.”

Even with Nero’s reassurance, Dante still has to make sure.

“As always, it’s your choice, kid. Whether you want to do it or not is up to you.”

Nero swallows harshly, the fear clear in his eyes, but Dante can tell that his mind is made up as he leans weakly forward, allowing Dante to raise the glass to his lips. Dante watches as the kid swallows the liquid down, the sore muscles of his throat straining to ingest the fluid, and he whispers encouraging words into Nero’s ear the whole time, petting his hair in a soothing motion with his free hand.

When Nero is done, Dante sets the glass back on the table, holds Nero tighter, and waits.

It takes less than five minutes for the emetic to kick in. 

The kid jerks violently in his arms, his hand flying to his mouth in a stiff, odd motion, and Dante helps him upright, managing to pull the kid’s hair out of his face in time for Nero to vomit into the toilet, heaving painfully against Dante’s hold with shallow, fast breaths.

It’s horrible to hear, and even worse to see, and Dante can’t even imagine what it must feel like to be Nero right now, his stomach turning painfully just from witnessing this from his second-hand perspective.

Nero’s retching is violent enough to attract Lady and Trish’s attention through the thin walls of his apartment, and they burst in a second later, looking down at the scene in front of them. Lady’s eyes flick towards the empty glass, and he can see her connecting the dots in her mind, can see the moment in which she realizes what Dante has done, her mismatched eyes hardening with worry and anger.

“Dante, are you _ fucking insane--?” _ she snarls out, starting towards them, and Dante instinctively shifts in front of Nero, as if shielding him from an attack.

Ironic, considering that the person in the room who’s done the most damage to the kid is the one holding him in his arms.

“We can’t wait,” Dante shakes his head, but his confidence is faltering underneath Lady and Trish’s combined stares, intrusive thoughts bubbling up to the surface, threatening to escape.

“Dante, I don’t think you’re thinking straight,” Trish begins, caution clear in her tone, and he almost gives in.

Maybe what he’s doing  _ is  _ wrong. Maybe he should just be patient and let nature do its work, let Dante’s mistakes untangle themselves on their own. It’d be easier that way--Dante can sit back and stew in his own worry and pretend like there’s nothing else he could be doing. Maybe Dante fucks up everything he touches anyway, so--

_ “No--!”  _ Nero chokes out, gritting his teeth and hauling his head up with some effort, fire sparking in his dilated eyes, unfocused and suspiciously bright with tears of pain. 

“I...trust Dante,” the kid continues, fingers clenched so tightly in the folds of Dante’s clothes that his hands are almost white. 

It takes all the energy that Nero has left, and then some, to force those three words out, but Dante feels the storm within him immediately quiet down, feels his conflict settle itself into something more self-assured.

Nero trusts him. He doesn’t need anything more than that.

“It’s Nero’s choice,” Dante reiterates, speaking for the kid as Nero falls back against him, eyes rolling back as he returns to unconsciousness.

Nero is more than well aware that this is the far more painful, gruesome route, and has chosen this path anyway. Because he believes in Dante.

Neither Lady or Trish look any less displeased, but they’ll respect Nero’s wishes, if not Dante’s judgment, and grudgingly, they relax.

“So what’s the plan?” Trish finally asks, crossing her arms over her chest, and Dante looks down at the kid in his arms, gently wipes the sweat away from Nero’s forehead, remembering the way it had felt when he’d pressed his head against Nero’s and asked to know him.

“I’ll probably have to alternate between feeding him a dose of the emetic and my own blood,” Dante begins, shifting Nero so that he can free his hands while keeping the boy situated on his lap.

“Need to reverse the starvation’s effects to keep him alive, but we’ll have to keep getting him to vomit, too. Nero told me that the blood he ingests dissolves into stored energy almost right away. So even if he’s throwing up every other hour, he should still keep what he’s getting from the blood.”

He’s held on tightly to his precious moments with Nero, has stored away every piece of important conversation into the back of his mind, and the words come out easily, even as his mind and heart belong fully to the boy in his arms. 

He’s too far gone by now, to claim that it’s anything less than what it is.

Dante almost chuckles wryly to himself as he deposits Nero back on the bed, then slots himself in beside Nero, watching as the kid naturally gravitates towards Dante’s chest, laying his head right above Dante’s heart. 

The sound of his heartbeat must be comforting to the kid, even in his sleep, because Nero’s face seems to relax, the pain written across his features dissipating for a blessed moment.

He spends a long time watching Nero, memorizing the look of his peaceful face, the gentle slope of his expression when it’s free of the usual guilt and deep hurt that haunts Nero’s daily life. 

Dante wants to keep this look on Nero’s face forever, but can only hold it in his memories when he goes to wake Nero up again, an hour later, flicking open his knife to make a cut down his arm for Nero to drink.

Nero is even weaker than he’d been when he was in the dying throes of his illness, can’t even lift his head up on his own, but when he sees Dante ready the blade, he reaches out, his right hand curling around Dante’s wrist, as if to stop him. He looks down at the boy in askance, but Nero only looks away, wincing as he swallows around the pain in his throat.

“It...won’t work if you do it,” Nero manages, and Dante slowly sets down his knife, unsure of what the kid means.

“M’sorry. I...didn’t know what else to do. Thought you were gonna die.”

Dante doesn’t understand until the kid, with great effort, lifts up his left arm, his dominant hand, the one he’s been purposefully avoiding the use of this entire time. The sleeve of the kid’s hoodie slips down, and Dante sees, standing out against Nero’s pale skin, a set of thick, dark fingerprint bruises. They’re so dark that they’re almost black, and when Dante wraps his hand gently around them, his fingers line up perfectly with the marks.

_ You must be a lucky man, Mr. Dante. _

He’s a lucky man, and Nero is his miracle.

On a whim, or maybe to quell the last surge of disbelief left within him, Dante makes the cut anyway, blade slicing longer and wider than he should let it, a rift opening up in the flesh of his forearm. 

Both of them watch as the cut stops bleeding in ten, fifteen seconds, before the skin closes up on its own.

Dante feels his throat tighten as he looks between his own, clean forearm to Nero’s bruised one, and he lowers his head, a dry chuckle forcing its way from his throat, even as he wipes at his stinging eyes with his free hand.

“Nero...”

“Don’t apologize,” he hears the kid say, shifting underneath him. “Won’t fix anything…won’t make me take it back. Don’t want to...don’t know how, anyway.”

In that moment, Dante feels that Nero understands Vergil better than he ever did, despite having never met the man in his life. They’re the two most important people to ever appear in his life, separated by a gap of two thousand years and prison bars, and their core values align in a way that Dante himself can’t begin to imagine.

Dante pulls himself back, looking down into Nero’s eyes. This conversation isn’t over, far from it, but Dante can’t afford to keep rooting himself in the past.

“We’ll talk about it when you’re better. For now...so, if I cut myself, it won’t work. But if you bite me, it should be fine, right?”

Nero gives a tiny nod, and Dante pushes himself up to lay against the pillows, pulling Nero up with him, and pressing the kid’s face into his neck, tangling his fingers in fluffy hair. They need to do this quickly, before Nero passes out again, and Dante tilts his head, barely able to feel Nero’s teeth pierce through his skin, whatever magic imbued in his vampiric bite preventing the wound from closing up through normal means.

The blood seems to do Nero a lot of good. At the very least, the kid stops trembling so hard against him, and the heat of fever subsides, although Nero still retains the warmth he’s so recently acquired. 

But when Nero pulls away, tilting his head upwards, the kid’s eyes are still more pupil than iris, and are too hazy and unfocused to be normal.

“Goin’ back to sleep,” Nero mutters, eyelids fluttering shut, and Dante lets him, against his better judgment, because he can’t help but want to give the kid a bit of a rest.

But it’s almost crueler this way, when he has to wake Nero up again, drag him to the bathroom, and force his body to turn against itself.

The kid takes it about as well as anyone in his situation could, at first, allowing himself to be carried through the motions, painfully purging the sleeping pills from his system as best as he can. Each time he wakes up, it gets harder, even if the hazy cloud in Nero’s eyes gets a little clearer every time.

Twelve hours in, and six doses of emetic later, Nero is pushing the glass away from him, turning his head aside, trembling from a mixture of dehydration, pain, and delirium.

“It  _ hurts, _ ” Nero admits, in a raw, vulnerable voice that tugs violently at Dante’s heart, and the fact that Nero is giving anything away at all is enough of an indication of how bad off it is. The kid shakes his head, shutting his cloudy eyes tightly.

“I don’t want to…”

He doesn’t finish his sentence, but the implication is clear, and Dante sets down the glass, shuffling them backwards so that he’s leaning against the bathroom wall, Nero curled up in his lap.

“Hey, kid,” Dante says quietly, tangling his fingers with Nero’s own, skin tingling at the contact. 

“I’m not giving up on you.”

Nero looks up at him for a long moment, before turning his face into Dante’s chest, mumbling out, in his small, weak voice, “Don’t copy me…”

Despite himself, Dante gives a small laugh, wrapping his arms more tightly around the kid and curling into him. He lets his head fall forward so that he’s pressing his face into Nero’s hair, feeling the feathery strands tickling at his unshaven jaw.

“Sorry. You can yell at me later all you like, yeah?”

Nero exhales softly, the motion cut off in a choked whimper as even breathing aggravates his ragged throat. 

“Don’t wanna yell at you,” Nero murmurs, his voice so soft that Dante has to strain to hear it, even in the deathly silence of the bathroom.

“Want...to tell you something.”

Dante’s certain that Nero can feel the way his heart jumps, and he runs his fingers slowly up the length of Nero’s spine, watching as the kid goes limp underneath his touch. Then, he gently pulls Nero away, touching the boy’s face with his hand.

Nero’s eyes flicker open again, and Dante sees, beyond the ageless, timeless depths of the shifting blue and black, an emotion that he feels deep in his own heart.

“Yeah,” Dante agrees, swallowing past the lump in his throat. “Me too, actually. Got a lot of things to tell you.”

Something like relief enters Nero’s wary gaze, and, despite everything, Nero’s face lights up in that little crooked half-smile of his. Dante traces the boy’s mouth with his thumb, staring hard at the curve of Nero’s smile, at the two little fangs poking out from underneath his lip.

“Tell you what--after all this is over, we’ll go somewhere nice. Just you and me, kid. And then we’ll talk.”

Nero shakes his head slightly, as if trying to shake off his lingering exhaustion, his grip on Dante’s hand tightening.

“Promise?” Nero asks, his tone heavy with the weight of the trust he’s putting into Dante, the loyalty he already has in him. 

“I promise,” Dante agrees, meeting Nero’s gaze steadily.

Nero’s eyes flicker resignedly to the glass of liquid, still resting innocuously against the cold bathroom tiles, and he gives a tiny nod, relaxing into Dante’s arms.

“...you’re on, old man.”

As Dante leans forward, he’s struck with the dark humor of the situation. They’re always like this, going around in an endless circle of hurting each other, whether intentionally or not. Nero’s sickness had been a result of not wanting to drink Dante’s blood, and Dante had gone through withdrawal in order to make sure Nero  _ could  _ keep drinking his blood. 

And now they’re sitting in the empty bathroom of Dante’s apartment, and Dante is hurting the kid, over and over again, ripping open his own heart to make it happen.

Vergil had told him, once, that caring about something was the worst pain he’d ever felt, and it is. 

Each one of Nero’s labored breaths, the sound of Nero’s soft whimpers of pain, the sight of tears on Nero’s face--he’d rather take Vergil’s sword and jam it into himself, over and over again for the rest of his life than continue to watch Nero suffer.

But caring about Nero is the best thing that’s ever happened to him, too.

Opening his heart up isn’t so hard anymore, now that Nero has taught him what to do. He’s spent ten years building up walls and shutting people out of his life, trying to protect the gaping hole that Vergil left in him because he was afraid of wandering too close to the edge and falling back in. 

But Nero’s hand is always waiting to pull him back out. Maybe with an exasperated comment or a scalding remark, but Dante knows that if he needs, he can count on the kid to remind him of how things are. 

The kid has given him just about everything that he has, and Dante wants to return all of it, and maybe more.

Definitely more. 

He curls his fingers around the glass, adjusts them both so that Nero can drink, and tips the liquid into Nero’s mouth.

And then he waits.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dante GETS WHAT HE WANTS  
> spot the propaganda in this chapter there r multiple

“Heads up, grandpa--when most people say ‘somewhere nice,’ a college is not the first thing that pops into their minds,” Nero informs him as Dante pulls up into campus parking lot, blowing his bangs out of his face, his expression settling into something like a pout.

Dante chuckles, leaning over and ruffling the kid’s hair, much to Nero’s apparent annoyance, trying to make himself sound at least a little apologetic, but it’s hard to keep the amusement out of his voice when Nero folds his arms and sinks lower into his seat.

“Sorry, kid. Between everything that’s happened, I’ve taken enough vacation days for the next three years. They’ll fire my ass if I don’t make up the days I’ve been out.”

“All of your students are dumbasses, anyway. Half of them don’t even pay attention when you talk,” Nero protests, unbuckling himself and pushing open the car door. 

That earns the kid a full-blown laugh as Dante follows suit, loosening the scarf around his neck and grabbing his stuff out of the backseat. Nero comes up on his other side, Dante’s red coat hung over his arm, the disgruntled look on the boy’s face only deepening as he attempts to smooth out the wrinkles in the fabric.

“You need to buy an iron. Or maybe at least start doing your own laundry.”

“Where’s the fun in that? Besides, I’ve got you now, don’t I?”

Nero ducks his head at that, unable to hide his flush at the unmistakable affection in Dante’s tone.

“Fucking hobo,” the kid mutters underneath his breath, and Dante sees the faintest hint of a smile before Nero quickly covers his own mouth with a hand.

Dante frowns, turning to fully face Nero, wanting to satisfy his long-standing curiosity in this matter. He reaches out, wrapping his fingers around Nero’s wrist, and gently tugs the kid’s hand away.

“How come you always do that?” 

Nero blinks up at him in confusion before his gaze drifts back down to his hand. 

“You mean...why I cover my mouth? Thought it was obvious,” he mumbles out, looking suddenly shy. “When I smile, my fangs come out. Can’t walk around letting people see that. Wasn’t really a problem before I met you, but now…”

The kid is too embarrassed to finish the rest of his sentence, but Dante gets the implication at the end of his words, an impossibly warm feeling blossoming in the bottom of his stomach. He reaches out, his hand falling against the small of the kid’s back, pulling Nero closer.

“Well, there’s a better way to fix that, don’t you think?” Dante begins, thoroughly entertained by the confusion on the kid’s very pink face. 

Before Nero can ask him to clarify, Dante uses his free hand to tug off his own scarf, depositing around Nero’s neck. The fabric drapes around the kid, nearly drowning half of his face before Nero reaches up to adjust it, fingers rubbing the soft fabric of the scarf.

“You’re...you’re just giving this to me?” Nero asks, and Dante finds his solution being proven immediately effective as Nero tilts his face into the scarf to hide his smile, the layers of black cloth highly effective in disguising Nero’s most obvious vampiric trait.

“It’s getting into the colder months, anyway. And you seem to get chilly a lot more easily than I do,” Dante points out, nodding at the layers of clothing Nero had bundled himself up in before he’d dragged the kid to work with him. 

“Can’t wear a tie with my scarf, anyway,” Dante continues, slipping said article of clothing from his pocket and hanging it around his neck, fingers starting to tie the strip of silk. Despite having done this every day of his career, Dante’s never been very good at this sort of thing, and he finds himself struggling with it for longer than he should.

He looks up when he feels Nero’s fingers against his, the kid looking determinedly not at Dante’s face as he undoes the mess that Dante’s created, properly knotting up Dante’s tie with much more precision than Dante himself had exercised.

“How come you can’t even tie a tie?” Nero demands, his voice slightly muffled by the layers of scarf in front of his mouth. “How do they expect you to teach anybody anything?”

“How come you  _ can  _ tie a tie?” Dante counters, because he doesn’t think he’s ever seen Nero wear non-hoodie clothing in the months that they’ve known each other, much less a full-on formal suit.

“I’ve seen other people do it. Not that hard to figure out.”

Dante would certainly beg to differ with that statement, but instead, he merely drops his hand into the kid’s hair, ruffling it gratefully. Nero is a lot smarter and more observant than he gives himself credit for, and Dante really wishes the kid would learn that about himself. Still, he knows Nero well--any outright praise Dante gives will send the boy into a flustered fit.

“Sure, kid. You’ve earned yourself the official honor of tying my tie every day, then.” 

“Gee, thanks,” Nero replies, sarcasm dripping from his voice, but he pulls the scarf up higher to cover more of his face, nearly hiding half of his expression in it, and Dante can’t help but stare. 

Without the scarf, Nero is already pretty easy on the eyes.

With the scarf, Nero is...quite frankly adorable, to say in the least.

Maybe the scarf was a mistake, actually. Dante’s going to have to make a bit of an effort to reign himself in if the kid keeps fiddling with the cloth like that.

“I’m gonna be late,” Dante forces himself to tear his eyes away from Nero, taking his red coat from Nero’s waiting arm and putting it back on his body, already starting towards the school. 

“What’s your plan today, kid? Lecture or office?” 

“Ugh. I’m tired of seeing your students gape at you like a school of dead fish. I’m staying in your office today.”

“Great!” Dante replies brightly, and he can practically feel the suspicion rolling off of the kid in waves. 

“I’ve got a shit ton of papers for you to grade. The little ducklings just turned in their midterm essays, and I figure you’re smarter than any of them. You can give them a preliminary evaluation, and I’ll check them over later and see if we agree on the grade. Sound good?” 

“No,” Nero answers, but in the sort of tone of voice that Dante has learned to interpret as a hesitant agreement, a usual indication that Nero wanted to do something but was too embarrassed to admit his acceptance.

He drops the kid off in his office, letting him sit in Dante’s comfortable chair and directing him towards the hefty stack of papers, which Nero eyes with no small amount of revulsion. Dante didn’t quite believe in minimum or maximum lengths for his essays, and, as a result, had ended up with a variety of papers.

Nero immediately fishes a single, crumpled piece of notebook paper out from the stack, glancing over the one handwritten sentence on it, then back at Dante.

“You should maybe consider raising your standards.”

Dante shrugs.

“Hey, that kid knew what he was doing when he turned it in like that. If he doesn’t want to put in the work, it’s not my problem. You got a bunch of decent looking ones in that stack, anyway. And there are always the overachievers to compensate for guys like this. Pretty exciting to figure out what kind of student’s work you’ll read next, isn’t it? Look alive.”

Nero reaches over, plucking a red pen from Dante’s pencil cup and turning it over in his hands. Dante notes that the movement of the kid’s left arm is still a bit stiff, and he pauses, tilting his head.

They still haven’t talked about the kid’s healing abilities--about anything, actually. Even with so much to say between them, they’ve reached a comfortable sort of agreement, both of them putting off the inevitable conversation in favor of peaceful cohabitation. 

But they can’t ignore it forever.

“Can I write on these?” Nero asks, pulling Dante out of his thoughts. 

Now probably isn't the best time to talk, anyway. Dante has to be at least five minutes late for his lecture.

“Take it away, kid. It’s open season for you.”

He trusts Nero to do good work, and Nero hasn’t proven him wrong before in the times when he’s handed off his paperwork for the boy to complete. With one last look at the kid, who is underlining something on the first paper of the stack, wincing as his left hand drags the pen across the paper, he leaves his office and heads to his first lecture.

Dante’s been making excuses for himself, he knows. It’s been a week since Nero expelled the last of the drugs in his system, and on the first full day that Nero had been fully awake for, Dante had told himself that he’d wait until Nero was fully recovered before delving into serious conversation topics.

But it’s become increasingly evident that it’s less a matter of Nero not being well enough to listen and more of a matter of Dante not knowing what he even wants to say. 

He doesn’t think he’s misinterpreted the way that Nero looked at him, and he’s fairly clear on his own feelings for the kid, as well. The problem that lies in between them is what Dante plans to do about it. 

And it has to be Dante who does something, because, despite two thousand years of age, Dante is clearly the more experienced adult in this situation. If any sort of rational thought is going to be put into this mess, it’s going to have to come from him.

There are a few too many factors complicating their current situation, the most obvious being that Nero is, in fact, a  _ vampire _ . With that rather large obstacle looming in the distance, it’s a bit hard for Dante to properly sort out the rest of his thoughts.

The lecture does his already clouded mind little good, and his students are unusually uncooperative today, perhaps because they’re still anxiously waiting for their essay grades back, which Dante will unfortunately have to provide within a week’s time or face the school board’s wrath.

Fuck his life.

Perhaps his general frustration at the entirety of his problems has built up more than he thought because Nero looks warily up at him when Dante returns to his office, slamming the door behind him with more force than he’d initially intended.

“What, it didn’t go well?” Nero questions cautiously, and Dante grunts out a nonresponse, collapsing into the chair opposite of Nero. 

It’s much less comfortable than his own office chair, but Nero is the one currently doing the work, so Dante will generously allow the kid his spot for a little longer.

“You could say that. You doing good with the papers?” 

Nero lets out a neutral sounding noise, before slashing violently through a line, leaving red streaks through the printed ink. Not very encouraging.

“Most of your students are actually morons. I think at least three people by now have misspelled ‘Fortuna.’ And differently each time. It’s almost impressive. Also, did you know that the great Savior was born today? As in, this present year and day? So did this guy.”

Dante smirks at Nero’s rather unforgiving analysis of whoever his current victim was, but Dante couldn’t exactly fault the kid. Some of his students were really only taking his class because they thought it’d be an easy A. Others might have only signed up because they’d wanted to get closer to Dante.

A little  _ too  _ close to him, in fact.

“Glad you’re having so much fun,” Dante replies, pausing to allow Nero to scoff in derision. “How’s, uh...how’s the arm, by the way?”

Nero stops writing, slowly lifting his eyes up to meet Dante’s again, reaching up to rub at the bruises underneath his sleeve. 

“It’s…”

Nero pushes up the sleeve properly, and Dante is rather dismayed to note that the bruises are still there, and still quite dark-colored, barely yellow at the edges. It’s been over a week and a half since Dante put them on the kid’s arm, and they’ve barely shown signs of improvement. 

“Like I said before, it’s not a big deal,” Nero mutters, but he drops his gaze down at the desk, and there’s a tightness on Nero’s face that betrays the worry he must feel.

The kid understands about as much as Dante does about this situation, which is to say, almost nothing.

Dante extends his own forearm, clenching his fist experimentally. He doesn’t feel any different, but he can’t forget the way the cut in his arm had closed on its own, flesh knitting itself back together and blood clotting in an instant.

“How’d you give it to me, kid? The healing, I mean.” 

Nero frowns, looking more thoughtful than anything, tapping the end of his pen against his lips idly.

“I...don’t think I meant to, actually,” Nero starts haltingly, as if he’s unsure of his words. He stares down at the bruises dotting his left arm, before turning his wrist over, hiding the marred flesh from view. 

“It was...already working more slowly than it should have. I didn’t follow you when you ran into the kitchen because I was confused...that the bruises were still there. The healing should have been instant.”

“So you’re saying that it already wasn’t working?”

Nero bites his lip, then slowly shakes his head.

“Maybe...not. When I went to drink your blood, I could feel it starting to heal, but...I noticed you weren’t waking up, even after I took most of your blood. I thought you were dead, that I maybe accidentally drained you dry, and I just.... _ really _ wanted you to be okay.”

Through his incredibly hazy recollection of the events, Dante remembers that he’d woken up to a sharp sting, one hard enough to hurt. He’d thought it was Nero’s bite at first, but Nero usually took extra care to make sure his bite was quick enough to avoid causing Dante any real pain.

Nero had been in his memories--or at least, the world of one. He’d reached out, and took Nero’s hand, and then...nothing.

“Was that actually you?” He asks out loud, then, at Nero’s look of confusion, hurries to clarify himself. “When I was asleep, I was dreaming about...a bad memory that I have. And then I saw you there. You yelled at me a lot--not too out of place, I guess. You wanted me to grab your hand.”

Nero’s bemusement seems to deepen at Dante’s words.

“And...did you?”

“Well, yeah. You were pretty insistent. You mean you don’t remember?”

The kid puts down the pen, watching it roll down the paper before it comes to a stop at the very edge of the table.

“I wasn’t in your head, I don’t think. Whatever you saw was an image made by your own brain. I only got...some of your memories. It wasn’t like when you saw mine--I wasn’t in your place or anything. It was more like watching a video.”

So Dante had been hallucinating both inside and outside his head. Wonderful.

“Maybe it was...when I transferred my healing ability to you, that was how your mind chose to make sense of it. Humans aren’t really supposed to deal with this kind of stuff. I guess it did the best it could to interpret things.”

It makes sense when Nero puts it that way, he supposes. In his apparent vision, Nero had been reaching out for him, offering something he’d been freely willing to give, and Dante had taken him up on it.

“Weird,” Dante manages, because he’s quickly realizing how out of his depth he is in this. If only he were as obsessed with the supernatural as Vergil had been.

Speaking of which…

“So you saw my memories? As in, plural? How many of them?”

Nero looks hesitant to answer, which makes a fair amount of sense, considering how Dante had been reacting to previous mentions of his past. 

“I didn’t mean to, I swear,” the kid begins nervously, and Dante shakes his head, leaning over the table and putting his hand over Nero’s in a soothing motion.

“I know, kid. It’s okay. I’m just curious. I don’t mind you knowing the full story anymore. Think you deserve to, after everything you’ve done for me.”

Nero nearly hides his face in his scarf at that last part, and Dante takes a moment to chuckle, running his hands through his own hair. Dante rarely ever minces his words, but he seems to have even less of a filter when it comes to the kid.

“I saw, uh...pretty much everything to do with your brother, I think.”

Dante hums in thought. Now that Nero knows everything, he supposes that it’s time to get a second opinion on things. And there’s no one he trusts more than the kid, at this point.

“What did you think about him?” He tries to keep the question as neutral-sounding as possible, which is difficult, since it’s about Vergil. 

Nero gives him an assessing sort of look, evidently scanning Dante’s face and finding what he needs, because he gives a little nod, more to himself than anything.

“I think he’s an asshole. And that his head is really fucked up. Didn’t seem like he cared much about anything or anyone,” Nero says honestly. “But I also think that you want him to have cared about you. And I don’t think you’d be wrong in thinking that.”

Dante raises a brow, his heart beating uncomfortably fast at Nero’s analysis, something unfortunately similar to hope fluttering in his stomach. He’s tried for so long to squash this stupid feeling, to lock it away along with any other Vergil-related thoughts, but he can’t help but want to hear more of Nero’s words.

“You really think so?” He winces at the desperation that bleeds into his own voice, trying to cover it up with a dry chuckle. The kid looks in no way convinced by his act as he adds, “I mean, he did stab me.”

Nero’s eyes flicker down to Dante’s lower right abdomen, where the scar rests underneath layers of clothing.

“Not fatally. Your back was turned, and you were trying to wake that little girl up. If he wanted, he could have killed you instantly and gotten about the same amount of blood needed for the sacrifice. And...you survived your apartment being blown up. I don’t think you could have done that without help.”

The kid pauses here, like he’s measuring out his words in his mind.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying he’s innocent or  _ nice  _ or even a good person. He’s not, at least not to me. But...I think there’s a lot to consider, there, in the gap between what he was willing to do to others and what he was willing to do to you.”

It feels like Dante has been waiting a long, long time to hear the words that Nero has just told him. Something within him feels like it’s been unlocked, a rush of emotion he hasn’t allowed himself to feel in too many years breaking free of the walls he’s put up around himself.

“He  _ is  _ a bad person,” Dante admits, because Vergil is still the murderer of at least a hundred people. “Doesn’t seem like I should be wanting him to care at all.”

He’s fishing for justification at this point, he knows, and he couldn’t be any more obvious about it, but he needs it. He’s circling around the hole, wandering too close to the edge, about to fall in at any time, and Nero is all he has. 

“He’s your brother. Being a shitty person doesn’t erase that.”

The reply sounds so simple in Nero’s words, and Dante finds ten years worth of guilt and internal conflict being soothed by this one boy. 

Nero shifts in his chair, looking slightly uneasy, his eyes faraway and distant, like he’s recalling something from his own past.

“Credo was the one who turned me in to the church, you know.”

Dante blinks at this new information, his mind involuntarily reviewing the memory of Nero’s death, an image he still has nightmares of, even to this day. He’d never gotten an exact confirmation, but he’d always assumed that Credo had been the brown-haired boy, the one who’d been slain in front of Nero’s eyes, the one who Nero struggled so desperately to get to.

“It wasn’t his fault. He was afraid. For Kyrie, mostly, but also for himself. Who wouldn’t be? The demonic energy just...appeared on my right arm, no explanation or anything. Credo thought the church would be able to purify me...he didn’t expect what actually happened.”

“But his actions killed you. All three of you,” Dante stares hard at Nero, who doesn’t look bothered in the least. If he were the kid, he’d be a hell of a lot more pissed at this Credo guy. A protective sort of anger stirs within Dante, and the memory of Nero’s death tastes even more bitter than before.

“Maybe so. But he always took care of me, up until that point. And I looked up to him--I still do. I don’t want that one thing he did in the end to define who he was to me. There’s a lot of good stuff in him, too.”

The kid is too nice.

But Dante can’t help but admit to himself that’s it’s much the same with him and Vergil. All this time spent refusing Vergil’s correspondence, drinking himself to death in an effort to pretend like his brother didn’t exist--Dante had been afraid.

Afraid of forgiving his brother, because he remembered everything that Vergil had done for him.

Vergil was, at one point, a good brother who went on to do terrible things, for reasons that Dante might never understand. But Dante can’t run anymore--either he has to choose to forgive Vergil or turn him away permanently.

And he’s always known, in the deepest part of his heart, what he wants.

Nero sits up straighter, and, his movements slow from the soreness in his left arm, reaches into the pocket of his hoodie, tugging out a slightly crumpled envelope.

“He wrote to you again this morning. Maybe you should let yourself read it.”

Dante takes the envelope, and both of them pretend not to see the way his hands shake as he turns it over in his hands, tracing the letters of his name on the back, written in Vergil’s flowing script.

“I...will.” 

He doesn’t think he can do this in front of Nero, just yet. But when they get back home and he finds a quiet moment alone, perhaps after Nero has fallen asleep, he’ll open it up and find out what Vergil has been wanting to say to him, after all this time.

Nero looks satisfied, picking up the pen, a small smile at his lips, one that he doesn’t bother to hide in the privacy of Dante’s office. The kid returns to grading the papers, and Dante rests his chin against his hand, idly playing with the paperclips on his desk.

Then, in a voice so quiet that Dante almost can’t make out the words, he hears:

“I’m...proud of you, Dante.”

Dante jerks his gaze upwards, his eyes landing on the top of Nero’s head. The tips of the boy’s ears are turning very pink, his head ducked into his scarf again, his eyes determinedly fixed on the papers.

“I...what?”

Nero’s flush darkens, and he glares up at Dante, more out of embarrassment than anything, running his fingers nervously through his fluffy hair.

“I know you heard me the first time, grandpa! Go buy yourself a hearing aid!”

Dante feels his face curl into an irrepressible smirk as he stands up and moves over to Nero’s side of the desk, getting in closer to the kid.

“Sorry, can you repeat that? I’m getting on in years, kid, as you’ve so kindly pointed out. Gonna need you to say it loud.”

“Fuck off!” Nero snaps, so easily flustered as usual, and Dante laughs, dodging the crumpled ball of paper that Nero tosses in his direction, ruffling the kid’s fluffy hair affectionately.

The kid protests fiercely against his actions, and Dante is eventually forced to admit defeat, pulling his hand reluctantly back and returning to his own side of the chair. He grabs the stack of already graded papers and puts his feet up on the desk, right next to Nero’s right hand, and starts flipping through.

Nero is right--they really  _ are  _ bad.

But the boy has written genuinely helpful criticism in the blanks, correcting even some of the worst mistakes with cutting, but not outright crushing remarks. He can practically hear Nero’s voice reading some of the comments in the margins, can imagine the spark of determined irritation in the kid’s eyes as he wrote on these papers. 

It’s so...Nero. Dante wouldn’t mind having the kid do this for all the rest of his papers, if only because of how fun these are to read.

“You ever think about becoming a teacher?” Dante asks, looking around the papers to glance at Nero. “You wouldn’t be half-bad at it. Hell, some of these mistakes  _ I  _ didn’t catch.”

Nero flushes, ducking his head underneath the praise.

“Well...I used to help Kyrie out when she was dealing with the kids. I taught them how to read the holy scriptures and everything. It wasn’t...bad.”

It’s not too hard to imagine a slightly younger Nero, sitting in the middle of a group of little kids, reading out loud to them. Despite the kid’s short temper and outward appearances, Nero has an incredible amount of patience and kindness stored within him.

_ And  _ he’s fluffy.

“Makes sense. Little kids like hanging around bunny rabbits.”

“I... _ what?” _ Nero squawks, his head snapping upwards with outrage. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Clearly, you’ve never looked in a mirror. You got a squishy face, kid. And fluffy hair. Pretty rabbit-esque, if you ask me.”

“Well, maybe you’re blind! Change your prescription, because these clearly aren’t working!” Nero snatches up Dante’s reading glasses from their case, squinting at the lenses before unfolding them and putting them on himself.

“Wow, your eyes really  _ do  _ suck,” the kid comments, which Dante almost doesn’t hear, because the visage of Nero, wearing Dante’s glasses on his face and Dante’s scarf around his neck, is a bit more than Dante can handle at the moment.

He reaches forward, gently plucking his glasses off of Nero’s face and looking into his eyes, ending up a bit closer to Nero than he thought.

“It’s a good look for you,” Dante admits, before he can shut himself up. “But I think I prefer to see your face on its own.”

Nero doesn’t say anything in response, doesn’t even blink or breathe, and Dante is worried that he’s broken the kid as they continue to stare at each other for a long moment, silence passing between them.

Dante forces himself to move back, sitting properly in his chair and folding up his glasses, putting them back in the case. When Nero remains completely still, Dante hesitantly snatches his papers back up, rereading the same line over and over again, his heart beating too fast in his ears.

“...Hey, Dante?” Nero asks slowly, and Dante forces himself to look casual as he flicks his gaze upwards.

“Yeah?"

Nero is tugging at his sleeves, pulling them nervously over his hands, stretching them out and watching the tension of the fabric pull it back into position.

“You, uh...I didn’t know if it’d be the right time. But...you said we would talk. And, um...I don’t think we have. About...what I thought it was gonna be about, at least.”

Dante has certainly put it off for long enough, but with Nero actively asking about it, he figures that today is as good of a time as any.

“We haven’t,” Dante acknowledges, and, when Nero continues to look uneasy, he continues, “We can today, if you want. After work. I promised I’d take you somewhere nice, and you know I’m a man of my word.”

“I know. And...yeah. I’d like that.”

Nero’s response is soft, but a warm weight settles in Dante’s chest anyway at the confirmation, and he chuckles, scratching idly at his jaw.

“I’ll be sure to make it good for you, kid.”

Nero nods in agreement, then tilts his head downward again, returning his focus to the papers. Dante flips through a few more of his own, agreeing with the grade that Nero’s written on the top in pencil for each one before duty calls and he’s forced to head off to teach another lecture, again.

It’s not exactly fun, resigning himself to being stuck in a room full of kids who refuse to listen to him.

But at least he has something to look forward to, now.

 

* * *

 

He decides to take the kid out for ice cream, because Nero, despite having been around since the invention of the dessert, has never had an ice cream sundae in his life, and Dante happens to have a lifetime’s worth of free strawberry sundaes at this particular shop, due to winning their Super Smokin’ Sexy Strawberry Sundae challenge a couple of years back.

A perfect combination, really.

Nero is pretty quiet the entire ride there, occasionally fiddling with the ends of the scarf he’s gotten so attached to over the course of the day. Sometimes, Dante thinks that the boy is looking at him, but whenever he glances over, Nero is staring determinedly out the window.

“Morrison’s Mont Blanc,” Nero reads the sign at the top of the shop carefully, no small amount of hesitance present in his tone, and Dante rolls his eyes, circling around the car and pulling open the passenger side door for Nero.

“Trust me. He makes the best ice cream around.”

“You wouldn’t happen to be saying that just because you get the stuff for free, would you?” Nero questions suspiciously, and Dante has to admit that the lack of a price tag greatly improved the flavor of any food.

“Come on, kid. Who do you think I am?”

“It’s  _ because  _ I know who you are that I say that.”

“My reputation precedes me, I see,” Dante says dryly, already starting to head towards the door, and he hears Nero scramble after him, struggling to keep up with Dante’s long strides.

The chimes on the door tinkle as Dante pushes it open, and Morrison looks up at him, a friendly smile crossing his face when he recognizes Dante.

“You brought a friend with you today, Dante?” 

“Something like that. Junior here has never had ice cream before. I’m here to get him a kiddie cone or something,” Dante informs the man solemnly, and he feels Nero peek up from his scarf to glare at the side of his head.

“Strawberry sundaes are always on the house for you. The kid looks like he can handle it--he can handle  _ you _ , at the very least.”

That earns a small laugh from Nero, which Dante finds vastly unfair.

“Alright, alright, you’ve had your fun,” he grumbles, pushing Nero into a booth and squishing in right next to him. A bit unnecessary, maybe, considering how the entire other side was open and available, but Nero doesn’t seem to have many complaints.

“This is gonna be like your shitty pizza all over again, isn’t it?” Nero demands as two strawberry sundaes are placed in front of them. “You’d better not watch me eat again like some kind of creep.”

“I make no promises.”

Nero picks up his spoon, poking haphazardly at the ice cream, like it might be some sort of dangerous animal, and Dante rolls his eyes, already starting to shove spoonfuls of his own sundae into his mouth, plucking off a strawberry and devouring it whole.

“I’m serious, Nero--it’s  _ good _ . And I was right about the pizza, wasn’t I?”

He gets a few more grumbles, but Nero eventually picks up a spoonful and hesitantly puts it into his own mouth, his expression twisting as the ice cream melts on his tongue. Dante, despite all earlier requests, watches the kid carefully, munching away at another strawberry.

It’s like watching the sun slowly rise, the way that faint happiness spreads over each of Nero’s features individually, before lighting up his face as a whole as he looks down at the entire bowl still left for him in something like excitement.

“So? Am I right, or am I right?”

“Don’t get a big head, you’ve only been right like, two times,” Nero reminds him as he digs in for more, taking the next few bites with a lot more enthusiasm than the rest, and Dante reaches over, blocking Nero’s spoon with his own.

“Woah, not too fast. You’ll give yourself a headache--just take it easy. I know, it’s amazing, and I’m always right.”

_ “You’re _ telling  _ me  _ to eat it slowly?” Nero raises a brow, nodding at Dante’s own bowl, which is already over three-fourths of the way empty.

“I, unlike you, am a learned scholar in the art of ice-cream eating. Got plenty of years of experience underneath my belt. You can’t hope to compete with me, kid.”

Unfortunately, his words of challenge only bring out the spark in Nero’s baby blue eyes, and he sticks his spoon back into his ice cream with a measure of defiance, stuffing in a larger-than-normal scoop into his mouth and glaring up at Dante, spoon-and-all.

Dante’s mind conjures not-quite unwelcome images of an angry chipmunk, and he laughs, tugging the spoon out of the kid’s mouth, and instead pulling him into what is essentially an upright cuddle.

Nero flushes, squirming under the attention and looking frantically around, but they’re the only two people in the ice cream store, except for Morrison, who is off in the back doing whatever he did in there. 

“I don’t think this counts as talking,” Nero informs him, but doesn’t seem all too displeased with Dante’s actions, shifting himself so that he’s practically nestled up into Dante’s side.

But Nero is right. Dante is getting ahead of himself.

“Sorry, sorry. I’m a man of action. Not too good with words.”

“You teach on a daily basis. How hard can words be?” The kid frowns, taking another bite of his ice cream, eyeing the strawberries on his dish warily.

“Well...the important ones always are.”

He watches Nero quickly avert his eyes, and takes the opportunity to reach over and steal one of Nero’s strawberries for himself, earning him a light smack against his chest. But he does notice that Nero uses his spoon to push most of his strawberries to the side, in a much more easily accessible cluster for Dante.

“I guess I’ll be honest and lay it all out on the table. I’ll tell you how I feel, and then you can show-and-tell next, sound good?”

He gets a nod in response, Nero’s baby blue eyes watching his face intently as Dante sighs out, rubbing at his jaw with a hand. He’s spent a long time covering up his own feelings behind an easy smile, but being around Nero loosens his tongue and lifts the pressure on his chest, and words seem to flow so much more naturally when the kid is around.

“So...I’m pretty crazy about you, kid. Fairly certain that I’m in love and all that shit. Whatever I feel goes way deeper than just general romantic interest, at the very least. I’ve pretty much let you into all of the worst parts of my life, and you seem to have come away pretty okay. And you still want to stick around, even after seeing all the fucked-up shit, which is impressive enough on its own.”

He tilts his head downwards, one hand coming up to ruffle Nero’s fluffy hair.

“Don’t think anyone’s ever done that for me before. Don’t think anyone else would be willing to. Trish and Lady, maybe, but it’s quite the same. So...you’re important to me, Nero. And you’re probably the best thing that’s happened to me in a long, long time. That’s just how it is.”

He leans back to nod down at Nero, in a silent indication that he’s done, and he can feel the way that Nero tenses against him, a mixture of muted happiness and worry swirling about in his eyes.

Dante thinks he should maybe feel worried as well--or nervous, at the very least, but he doesn’t. Whatever Nero’s reply is, or however Nero feels about him, none of it will change how Dane feels about the kid. 

“Dante, I…” Nero looks at his ice cream, taking another bite to maybe buy himself time, and Dante waits patiently, opting to finish the rest of his own bowl. 

“I don’t know what I feel for you,” Nero admits, bringing up his left arm and rubbing at the bruises underneath. 

“When you were dying...the last time I felt so much for a person, felt so deeply like I had to save someone, it was with Credo and Kyrie. And it’s kind of the same with you, but different. They were like my family. But you’re...something else.”

Nero ducks his head, looking more unsure of himself than Dante’s ever seen him, and Dante realizes that nineteen years of human life might have been too short to let Nero really experience this sort of emotion.

“I don’t really know what that something else is. But I assume...the fact that I, uh…” Nero’s voice drops in volume until Dante has to lean in to hear it. 

“I always feel really...safe around you. Like if I don’t know where to go, I can just follow your shitty old man ass, and things will turn out okay. Even if you have no common sense and half your brain cells are dying out in a mass of pizza...I trust you. And you make me feel like you need me. I like all of that. And I like you.”

When the kid looks back up at him, Dante sees nothing but an open honesty in his eyes, the kind that makes him glance around to check, once again, that the shop is empty, before he leans in, pressing his forehead against Nero’s.

“Glad to hear it,” he chuckles softly, wrapping his fingers around Nero’s own. 

It’d be easy to close the gap between them, to kiss Nero and officially open up a door to something that both of them seem to want, but Dante knows that there’s a lot more than the matter of their mutual feelings at stake.

“Problem is...what are we going to do about it?” He continues, and from the way that Nero gives a tiny, resigned sounding sigh, he can guess that Nero understands Dante’s reservations as well, holds them close to his own heart.

“I don’t think it’s fair,” Nero admits, but doesn’t pull away from him. “To you, I mean. Because...of what I am. And because this whole bond thing happened sort of accidentally. I don’t want you to be stuck with me just because of that.”

It’s more unfair to Nero than it is to him, in Dante’s opinion, and he doesn’t hesitate to say so, turning over Nero’s hand in his own.

“That’s another thing,” Dante picks up where Nero leaves off, not wanting the silence between them to hang in the air for longer than necessary. “You don’t want to live like this, right? Having to keep drinking blood, whether we’re bonded or not. And just...living as a vampire in general.”

Nero inhales shakily, and he presses a hand against Dante’s shoulder, breaking their forehead contact so he can stare down at his lap.

“I don’t know. The church always had principles about this kind of thing. About...wanting to end your life. And...dying  _ hurts _ . It hurt a lot, that first time. I’m...afraid of it. And I’m afraid of not knowing where I’ll end up afterward.”

“You believe in the afterlife, kid?”

Nero shakes his head in an almost imperceptible motion.

“When I died...before I chose to come back. There was a lot of...nothing. It felt like I was just floating there and I couldn’t feel or hear or see anything and I didn’t even know how long it was. Maybe part of the reason why I picked coming back was because I didn't want to be there anymore. I don’t...want to go back. I don’t want to be stuck like that.”

The kid seems to curl up in on himself, looking very small, and Dante wraps an arm around him, pressing the kid’s face into his shoulder in a hug. He can’t pretend to understand exactly how Nero feels, but he can certainly listen, and stick by Nero’s side until the kid makes a decision on his own.

“Kyrie and Credo gave up their lives to protect me,” he hears Nero continue, his voice muffled by the scarf and the layers of Dante’s clothing against his mouth. “So...shouldn’t I keep going for them? If I die, then…their sacrifices won’t mean anything, anymore. And then there’s you. I don’t want to leave you.”

Dante winces at the reminder of his hesitancy to enter a relationship with Nero. He doesn’t want to become a weight on the kid, to become something tying Nero down to this world when Nero might want to be free. 

“It’s your life, though, kid. You’re the one who has to live it,” Dante says, hoping his voice is as neutral as he attempts to make it. “How do  _ you  _ feel?”

Nero sighs out, laying his head further against Dante’s shoulder.

“I’m...tired. I’ve been around for a really long time. And after a while, living just sort of...starts to suck. But with everything that I just said...I don’t know what to do.”

Dante doesn’t reply for a long moment, mostly content to mull things over in his own mind, holding Nero close to him. Eventually, he slides his hand away from Nero’s waist, nudging the kid’s head upwards.

“Your ice cream’s gonna melt.”

Nero gives him a somewhat incredulous look, but leans back over his bowl, taking his tiny rabbit nibble bites out of the dessert.

“It’s a bit of a problem, yeah,” Dante starts, and Nero snorts softly at his massive understatement, but the tension is already leaving the kid’s shoulders, the lines of unhappiness around his face slowly disappearing as he makes his way through the rest of his three scoops of vanilla.

“But you don’t have to make the choice now or anything. You’ve got a lot of time--a lot more than you want or need, but that’s besides the point.”

“I don’t think I want to make the choice, ever,” Nero mumbles around his spoon. “I don’t know enough about what happens, and I don’t know how to find out, and I don’t want to do anything if I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m...stuck.”

Knowledge is hard to come by, especially on a topic like this. Even Lady and Trish, who’d been hunting vampires, amongst other creatures, for pretty much all of their professional lives, really only knew how to get rid of vampires, and not much about the mystical side of things. There was that new recruit of theirs, but Dante doesn’t feel too comfortable sharing Nero’s situation with him, and he doesn’t think it a good idea to just bring it up without a sense of foundation.

So, with their limited options, that really only leaves Dante with one answer.

Dante’s hand slips into his pocket, fingers tracing the edge of the envelope stored away in the folds of cloth. He’s never forgotten the look of Vergil’s handwriting, even after he’d locked every one of his brother’s possessions away in that storage unit, and hadn’t looked back since.

“I think I got something that can help, kid.”

Nero looks up at him, that same, confused, lost expression still lingering in his eyes, and Dante feels his resolve solidify. This is the least he can do for Nero, the most guidance he can offer to the kid in his time of need.

And this is a part of Dante that he’s ready to reopen, after all this time.

“My brother was pretty obsessed with demons, as I’m sure you know. He had a whole library’s worth of notes about this stuff. After his trial, I kept it all--his books, his notes, his papers, everything. If there’s an answer out there, I’m sure he’d have found it. That’s the kind of person he is.”

The surprise on Nero’s face is obvious, but the kid chews thoughtfully on his lip, thinking Dante’s suggestion carefully over in his mind.

“Dante...what exactly are you offering?” Nero asks slowly, and Dante doesn’t miss the unspoken end of Nero’s question, that Nero is asking which side of the kid’s life that Dante falls on.

He has to stay neutral. No matter what he wants, this is about Nero.

“I’m offering a chance to help you find out more about your condition, that’s all. Because it’s your biology and your life--it’s your right to know. Nothing more than that.”

Nero swallows hard, dropping his gaze back down to the table.

“And...let’s say we find out something that might influence things one way or the other. What...then?”

What, indeed. Dante can easily say for himself that his ideal future is one in which Nero is around with him, and in which Nero is happy. But if those things aren’t able to coexist in the same world, then…

He tries to put it out of his mind as best as he can, his fingers rubbing idly at his stubble.

“Then what happens, happens. You’ll do whatever you do. But I’ll stick by you, no matter what, kid. We’re in this together, aren’t we? Always have been, from the start. You’re stuck with an old man like me, and I’m stuck with a brat like you, until the end of our contract.”

Nero smiles, then, equal parts sad and grateful, his hands touching the scarf tucked beneath his chin.

“Yeah. I guess we are.”

It feels more than a little strange, to be throwing around something like Nero’s life in the middle of an empty ice cream parlor, but this moment is only between him and Dante and no one else, a silent contract with hidden fine print.

“Gotta warn you though. It’s a real library up in there--might take us a long while to find what we need. And we might not find it at all,” Dante warns, testing out the waters.

“That’s…” Nero pauses for a long moment, busying himself with the task of pushing another strawberry into his Dante-reserved pile. 

“If we don’t find anything...maybe it means I’m supposed to stay. I don’t know. I can’t even tell what I want.”

Dante considers this for a long moment, and maybe he should stop himself before he pushes too far, but he still shifts impossibly closer to Nero, the motion causing the kid to look directly up at him.

“Do you want to be in love with me?” 

He isn’t asking Nero to stay, isn’t asking the kid to choose him over anything else. He’s asking for time--if Nero wants to spend however many days or months or years he might have left with him.

Nero tilts his head upwards, their faces separated by their last remaining boundary.

“I shouldn’t,” Nero whispers, his face young and his eyes old.

Then his eyelids flutter shut, curtains falling over ancient depths of blue. Dante faintly registers the warm fingers against his jaw, the hand tangling in the fabric of his shirt as Nero’s eyelashes brush against his skin, his warm breath ghosting over Dante’s face.

The final gap left between them closes, the world shrinks down to just the two of them and no one else, and Dante, more honest with himself than he’s ever been before, presses his lips against Nero’s.

He shouldn’t-- _ they _ shouldn’t.

But Dante’s never been very good at doing what he’s supposed to, anyway.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ASJDFKSJFLKSJFLKS IM SORRYYYYYYYYYY FOR THE DELAY AHGHAGHHGHG i had 2 take finals...and then move back home....agh.........BUT hopefully this extra long chapter make up for it a little............now that i am settled and am in summer break i shall return 2 consistent update schedule...
> 
> ALSO there is a very vaguely described sex scene near the end i tried 2 keep it very vague but just letting people kno in case

Dante is sitting on the edge of his bed, with a letter in his hands and his head in the clouds.

It’s a bit cliche, maybe, but his mind hasn’t stopped spinning since he’d kissed Nero. The moment itself had been brief, had probably only lasted a second or two, and, compared to the other kisses Dante’s had in his life, it’d been fairly chaste. 

But when he’d pulled away, only just enough so that their faces were no longer touching, the open, honest look in Nero’s eyes had felt entirely different than anything Dante’s experienced before.  _ No one’s _ ever looked at him like that, with so much unconditional love and trust, not his own brother, not his two closest and only friends, no one.

So Nero means a lot to him. And he means a lot to Nero. 

It’s such a painfully simple observation, but one that he still can’t quite wrap his head around. He hasn’t done anything, really, to earn or deserve the kind of faith that Nero puts him, and yet he has it anyway. It feels like standing on the narrow precipice of a cliff, like if he takes one misstep, he’ll fall and go right back to where he started.

But that same feeling is what makes Dante’s heart beat a little faster, is what makes the blood in his veins flow a little freer and the excitement in his gut burn a little brighter. He doesn’t know where he’s going with Nero, or where he’s going with this relationship at all, and the amount of unknown waiting on the other side for him is tangibly invigorating.

He sighs out, running his fingers against the edge of the sealed envelope again, checking the door of his bedroom.

Nero had gone and passed out on the couch the second they’d gotten back, as excessively sleepy as always, and Dante had draped a blanket over him and spent a good ten minutes watching the kid’s sleeping face before remembering that he had a job to do and a promise to keep.

The envelope is thin, feels like a single sheet of paper, which is a little surprising, actually. Vergil’s always been curt and blunt with his verbal words, but when it came to putting pen to paper, no one was more eloquent than his twin. His brother had always found it easier to write out his thoughts than to voice them aloud, so different from Dante, who generally said whatever came to mind.

He’s stalling for time, he knows, but even after all the progress he’s made, opening up this particular can of worms feels like a big deal. Vergil’s been writing to him for about ten years now, sending him at least one letter on their shared birthday almost every year, without fail. 

Some years, he sends more, and others, it’s just the one. Dante doesn’t even know if that’s a good or bad sign. After all, he’s never read any of the letters, save for the very first one.

The address of his new home is printed neatly on the center of the back of the envelope, written in his brother’s flowing script. 

He’d told his brother his new address, had repeated it several times at Vergil’s turned back ten years ago, when he’d gone to visit Vergil in prison for the first and last time. 

“Write to me, Verge. Write to me and I swear I’ll answer,” he’d told his brother, pressing his hand desperately against the glass that separated them, staring hard at the back of his brother’s head, as if he could make Vergil turn and face him by sheer willpower alone. 

He’d offered his brother a listening ear, had promised him some form of comfort in his new lifestyle of twenty-three hours of solitary confinement, because at the time, he’d still been so desperate to believe that he knew who Vergil was.

Dante hadn’t seen the way they’d changed into strangers back then, even as Vergil had firmly refused to answer him or even acknowledge his presence, and Dante’s single hour of visitation for the day had expired.

He’d gone back every day of the week after that, only to get the same non-existent response, and eventually, somewhere between the moments spent sitting on the hard wooden floor of his new, empty apartment and taking drink after drink from bottles of whiskey, he’d given up.

He’d given up on Vergil, and he’d given up on himself, and he’d given up on trying to pretend like what he felt inside was nothing. Over the weeks, the raw grief and betrayal that he’d felt towards his brother had hardened into something like bitter resentment, and then into something else he didn’t entirely recognize.

And then, when he’d finally taught himself to stop expecting a letter, his birthday rolled around and brought with it a single, creased envelope with the official stamp of Vergil’s prison inked harshly onto the back.

Dante had opened it badly, with shaking hands, unsure if what he felt right then was hope. 

Inside was a single sheet of paper, ridiculously large for the two lines penned onto the top. 

The first line was an address that Dante dimly recognized as one that the police and Lady and Trish had looked into when searching for evidence for Vergil’s trial. They’d gone inside the storage unit at this address and had pulled out parts of his brother’s life and shoved them into little plastic bags and Dante had helped them, because Dante had taken them right to it.

The second line was a request, worded more like an order for him to follow, as if Dante was still the younger, eight-year-old twin who hung onto Vergil’s every word like his brother knew everything about anything.

_ Let no one but yourself preserve what is left. _

Dante hadn’t even known how badly he’d hoped for something else until he’d read that sentence. He’d hoped for proof that Vergil was still the brother he knew, hoped for some sort of explanation, no matter how crazy or unbelievable, hoped for a way to pretend like Vergil was innocent. Or maybe he’d hoped for comfort, for some selfish form of bringing peace to his own mind.

Instead, what he’d gotten was worse than nothing. 

And so he’d tried to make himself feel nothing, had gone to the address, the lot free of the lines of yellow police tape now that the investigation into his brother’s trial had been concluded and the evidence had been returned to Dante’s position. He’d dragged everything out, thrown every book and every paper into a pile, and had been more than prepared to burn it all into ash and into smoke and into the nothing he so badly wanted to feel.

But then he’d caught a glimpse of a stray scrap of paper, of the shape of his brother’s handwriting against crumbling pages of ancient books. It was just one word, was just Vergil’s name, because Vergil always wrote his name on things to claim them as his own.

These things--all of them were Vergil’s. And all of them were the only thing Dante had left of the brother that he wanted to know.

And no matter what he told himself, Dante didn’t want to have nothing.

So Dante had haphazardly shoved everything back into its rightful place and closed the garage door of the storage area and had burned up the first letter he’d ever gotten from his brother instead, even as its contents permanently seared themselves into the back of his mind.

He hasn’t read a letter from his brother since, and he still doesn’t know if he can do it now.

Dante looks between the letter in his hands and his locked bedroom drawer, where all the rest are still neatly stacked inside. He could do it--he could shove this piece of paper away. He could fall off of the cliff and go right back to the beginning.

But he made a promise, and he’d looked into Nero’s baby blue eyes when he’d done it and Nero had told him he was proud of him. Dante would have to be a special kind of bastard to go back on his word now.

Keeping the letter in hand, he forces himself to stand up, moving slowly towards his bedroom door and out into the living room, where Nero is still curled up on his couch, one arm tucked underneath a pillow, his fluffy locks of hair falling over his face. Nero’s happily nestled into the blanket that Dante put over him, mumbling softly to himself in his sleep, and Dante keeps quiet as he sits on the floor near the boy’s head.

“Hey, Nero?” He asks softly, because he’s come to know what a light sleeper the kid is.

Nero cracks one eye open, twisting his head to look properly at Dante, making a muffled sound of inquiry.

“I, uh...I need…” Dante swallows, then looks down at the letter in his hands, because he still doesn’t know how to say what he needs to.

Nero’s gaze follows the motion of Dante’s own, and it takes the kid a few seconds to piece things together before he’s slowly sitting up, rubbing at his eyes with a hand and combing his fingers through his messy, rumpled hair.

“You going senile, old man?” Nero mumbles out, folding his arms and relaxing back into the couch. “Should have woken me up earlier.” 

Dante breathes out a chuckle, relieved at Nero’s understanding of what Dante hasn’t said.

“Well, you get pretty snippy when I wake you up from naptime. Kind of like a kitten.”

Nero scowls at him, which does absolutely nothing to disprove Dante’s baby animal comparison, not with the way that Nero’s fluffy hair is still falling into his bleary eyes, his cheeks rather adorably puffed out.

“I still say you’re blind. Come sit on the couch before you break your crusty ancient assbone on the floor,” Nero demands as he moves the pillow out of the way, pulling back the blanket to make a space for Dante, who feels impossibly warmed by the gesture.

Dante obediently moves up onto the couch and, the moment he’s settled in, Nero shuffles closer to him, leaning into his side without comment and pulling his knees up so that he’s properly curled up against Dante. 

Nero’s weight is a reassuring warmth against his body, and Dante looks fondly down at him for a long moment, before he returns his attention to the envelope, slipping his finger underneath the gap in the seal and gently breaking it open.

The letter is a single piece of paper, as he’d predicted, but when he unfolds it, Vergil’s tiny handwriting takes up over half of the page. 

“Woah. He’s sure got a lot to say,” Nero mutters from beside him, rubbing at his eyes again.

Dante inhales slowly, hating the way that his hands shake from both anticipation and nervousness, all from a single letter. 

Nero nudges at his arm lightly, the one closest to Nero’s body, and looks up at Dante expectantly. Taking the hint, Dante gratefully wraps his free arm around the kid, letting Nero in even closer, drawing the reassurance he needs from the boy’s presence.

Then, tilting the letter towards Nero, at an angle that Nero can subtly read the words and satisfy his curiosity without having to admit to it, Dante begins to read.

The letter is nothing, but not in a bad sense.

It reads more like a diary, really, with Vergil merely detailing events that transpired between his previous letter and this one, recounting them for Dante to read or to ignore. There are no apologies or explanations, no mentions of what occurred ten years in past. 

The writing sounds so much like his brother that it almost hurts. Dante can hear Vergil’s voice in his mind, the not-quite-deep, rasping lilt that accompanied the ends of his words, the way he placed emphasis on certain syllables, especially the ones of Dante’s name. 

It’s the Vergil he knew, and it’s someone different altogether, somehow at the same time. 

His Vergil was never this talkative with him, was never so open with sharing the minute details of his day, always considered them trivial and beneath his notice. This Vergil, perhaps weathered down by ten lonely years of the same endless routine, is content to write everything out to Dante, to tell him what he sees and how he feels and what he thinks. 

Dante’s read over his brother’s shoulder for long enough to understand the way Vergil writes, can see where he presses too hard down on the paper from when his emotions might have gotten the best of him or darkened thoughts of the past crept into his mind. Some parts are light and a little less immaculately scripted, like the way Vergil’s words always looked when he was tired, staying up until the early hours of the dawn to finish a paper or add more to his notes.

And, at the end, in between the penultimate and the final sentence, an uneven break in the spacing, an indication of a pause between words and thoughts, a mark of Vergil’s hesitation.

_ As always, if you still wish to keep your final promise, then do so. _

Dante’s never had enough courage to ask for the things he needs, and Vergil’s always had too much pride to ask for the things he wants.

“Hey, Dante? You still in there?” Nero asks softly when he sees that Dante is done reading, blinking up at him through his snowy eyelashes. The kid is watching his face carefully, like he’s trying to measure out Dante’s reaction.

Dante looks down, wondering exactly how long he’s spent sitting here, staring down at this piece of paper.

“I...yeah,” he answers numbly, shaking his head to try and clear his own thoughts. “I just don’t get it, I guess. He hates me. Or at least he did the last time I went to see him, ten years ago. He wouldn’t even look at me.”

Nero frowns thoughtfully, tilting his head. The kid doesn’t know the full story, is still only privy to whatever memories he’d seen in Dante’s mind all that while ago, but his eyes are wise, like he understands anyway.

“He’s had a lot of time alone to think about stuff, though. And I don’t think he hated you. He just didn’t want to see you right then.”

“You think he’s changed?” Dante is unable to keep the mixture of hope and skepticism out of his voice, but Nero shakes his head.

“People don’t really change, I think. But their intentions do. And if all the letters he’s been writing to you have been like this, then I think he’s pretty intent on keeping you in his life now. Or at least he’s trying to.”

Right. Whether Dante is going to let him back in or not, is the real question.

“So...are you going to write back to him?”

There’s nothing expectant or judging about Nero’s tone, like he so firmly believes that whatever decision Dante makes will be the right one. Dante doesn’t answer immediately, turning his attention back to the letter and fiddling with the paper for a few moments.

On its own, the letter is innocuous enough, but Dante finds it difficult to reconcile his last image of his brother, who wouldn’t even look or speak at him, with the one that he’s holding in his hands now.

“I…don’t know. It’s been a long time since I last saw him. I don’t think I’d know what to say anymore, honestly.”

Nero hums quietly in thought, tugging idly at a loose thread on the sleeves of his hoodie.

“I don’t think you have to say anything. He didn’t really say anything, either. He’ll be happy just to get a letter from you at all, probably. And you’ve probably got at least some kind of story you want to talk about with him.”

Dante laughs weakly, gently retracting his arm from around Nero’s waist to fold the letter up, putting it carefully back in the envelope and resealing it, leaving it exactly the way it’d been when he’d gotten it.

“Guess I do. But...I don’t know. What, do I tell him about the cute new vampire I’ve adopted?”

Nero flushes, pulling up the scarf he’s still wearing and ducking his face in it, glaring hard with embarrassment at his lap.

“Well, you  _ can _ , if you want. I don’t think it really matters--you’re pretty good at blabbering on about nothing. Ask any of your students, I’m sure they’d say the same thing,” Nero snips at him, his words hurried in a thinly veiled effort to cover up how flustered he is at Dante’s comment.

“Either way...he didn’t really write like it, but I’m pretty sure he has to be a little desperate by now, especially if he’s been writing to you like this for all this time.”

Dante winces, causing Nero to look sharply at him, cutting across Dante’s next statement with a sharp rebuke of his own, before Dante can even get a word out.

“Don’t you dare blame yourself! Just because he wants something doesn’t mean you had an obligation to fulfill it, especially not after everything he’s done! I’m telling you that you should write to him because I think that  _ you  _ want to do it. I think you miss him, and you and I both know that you aren’t going to see him in person any time soon--not that you should feel pressured to--so this is the next best option, isn’t it?”

Nero’s words so easily push away the self-doubt that Dante’s been fighting with for the longest time, his irritated eyes sparking with a certain amount of protectiveness, and Dante belatedly realizes that Nero is protective of  _ him _ .

The kid is so much smaller than him, and outwardly so much younger looking that Dante can’t help but find his largely successful attempts to shield Dante from himself completely endearing. He smiles, reaching out to ruffle the boy’s fluffy locks, thoroughly enjoying the squawk of protest the action earns him.

“You’re pretty good at this kind of thing, aren’t you?” Dante asks, in a tone as light as he feels. “Wish I had you here about ten years ago--pretty sure you could talk even Vergil out of his homicidal tendencies.”

Nero makes a face at him, trying futilely to fix his increasingly messy hair, before eventually giving up and allowing his head to flop against Dante’s arm.

“I doubt it. Like I said, people don’t change. Stupid people stay stupid, no matter what. It’s why I still can’t get you to eat anything other than pizza after all this time.”

“So you think I’m stupid, and yet, you like me. Hm…”

“Yeah, because I’m pretty stupid, too,” Nero grumbles, but does nothing to dissuade Dante of the notion of his affections.

“Maybe you just have excellent taste in people. Metaphorically, I mean. Not too sure what I taste like literally.”

The kid’s embarrassment spikes up to near unprecedented levels at Dante’s words, and he combs his fingers through his messy bangs, squishing his face further into Dante’s arm, likely so he won’t have to look up at him. Dante briefly has to wonder if he’s crossed a line, but Nero looks more flustered than anything, despite the sensitivity surrounding the topic of Nero’s nature.

“Well, I’m not telling you! You’d just get an even bigger head, anyway.”

“Does that I mean I taste good?” Dante raises a brow, trying to angle Nero’s face back towards him so that he can smirk down at the kid, but Nero is as stubborn as always.

“If you’re so curious, why don’t you find out for yourself?” 

“Oh, I would, but I’m saving all of it for you, kid.”

Nero finally looks up at him at that, something like exasperation and fondness written across his face.

“Wow, how generous of you,” he remarks dryly, but then averts his gaze, looking almost shy.

“...thanks,” he mumbles out, almost too quietly for Dante to catch.

Dante pretends not to have heard the kid, to allow Nero to save a bit of face, but he does lightly nudge his arm against Nero’s body in a silent acknowledgment, one that Nero can choose to ignore if he wishes.

They stay like that for a long moment, with Dante looking at the address of Vergil’s prison on the back of the envelope in his hand and with Nero leaning against him, evidently on the verge of falling back asleep. The kid yawns feebly into his scarf, nestling up closer against him and drawing another gentle chuckle from Dante.

“Back to naptime already? Kids get cranky without one, after all.”

“I’m not a kid…” Nero mumbles, very half-heartedly his eyes already closed. “Old people take naps too, anyway.”

“You’re right about that,” Dante says agreeably, allowing the comment to slide as he adjusts them carefully so that Nero is lying mostly on top of him, his head pressed against Dante’s chest in the way he likes it to be.

He doesn’t usually sleep in late afternoon like this, but Nero’s warmth against him easily pulls him into a sense of comfort, and watching the slow rise and fall of Nero’s chest as the boy curls up on him is relaxing enough to make Dante shut his own eyes, leaning his head back against the pillows.

“So...you’ll write to him?” Nero repeats his initial question peeking sleepily up at him through his bangs, his head tilted upwards against Dante’s chest. 

Dante drops his hand into the kid’s hair, in an easy, familiar motion, and it feels natural, like it was always meant to be there. 

“Seems that way.”

Nero nods absently, like Dante is merely confirming a fact he already knew, before fully relaxing against him. His breathing quickly evens out as the kid is pulled underneath the curtain of unconsciousness, evidently content with both Dante’s response and Dante’s presence.

He stays awake for a while longer, the image of Vergil’s face floating through his mind as he rubs small circles into the back of Nero’s head, in a reassuring gesture more for himself, than anything. 

Soon enough, he’ll have to go another step further. He’ll have to drive back to that address he’s never forgotten, with Nero in tow, and open up the part of his brother’s life that Vergil had wanted to be kept secret. 

He hasn’t forgotten it, though, the request his brother made of him, asking that he and he alone be the one to poke around in the ruins of what was left. Despite how negatively he’d felt about it at the time, it doesn’t feel quite right to betray Vergil’s words like that, especially not now, after reading his most recent letter.

So he’ll ask for permission, then. He won’t give Vergil the full details of everything, doesn’t think he wants to front-load this on his brother just yet. But he’ll write up a letter, and he’ll bring two of the most important people in his life a little closer with it.

Nero is still fast asleep on top of him, and Dante is feeling a little too lazy to move, anyway, but in his mind, he mulls over what he wants to say, the first words to reach his brother in a decade unfolding in his mind.

_ Hey, Verge-- _

He smiles softly, his thoughts easily falling into conversation, even after such a long gap between the two of them.

_ Remember how you used to like that marshmallow cereal? _

 

* * *

 

Two weeks later, with Vergil’s response in his hands, he drives Nero to the storage unit and opens it back up.

As far as Vergil knows, Nero is just a normal kid that Dante’s happened to stumble across, one that he’s gotten fairly close to. From the way that Dante had framed the situation, Nero was a student of his that needed extra knowledge on the nature of demonic entities for a personal project. 

A bit of a stretch, if he’s honest with himself. 

Maybe it’s proof of the way that Vergil’s mindset has shifted during his time in prison, or maybe it’s because Vergil was satisfied to get a letter at all from Dante, but his brother allowed Nero’s presence in his private things fairly easily.

_ If you trust this boy, Dante, then I suppose I will leave the matter in your hands. _

“He trusts you,” Nero had said simply, handing the letter back to Dante and busying himself with fixing Dante’s tie. “And I guess that’s enough for him.”

The faith that Vergil is evidently putting in him leaves Dante a little uncertain about the way he was essentially lying to his brother, but he didn’t want to drag Nero’s vampirism and the fact that Dante was bonded to this kid into the fray. The topic, he suspects, cuts a little too deeply for the both of them, and it isn’t something Dante wants to talk about over mail.

In person, perhaps he would.

But he can’t quite go there yet.

It’s hard enough for him to sit on the dusty floor of the cramped area and look through his brother’s life, and Dante has admittedly been taking his time with sorting through Vergil’s storage unit. He’d feel bad about how obviously he was stalling, if Nero didn’t seem to so hesitant to proceed with things as well.

Dante’s starting to get the impression that Nero’s indecision is factoring into a big part of his reluctance, that it’s what stops Nero from simply sifting through the titles written on the spines of the books and just extracting all of the relevant vampire-related ones from the pile.

Dante’s not really in any rush to figure things out, either. The more time he has with Nero, the better, as selfish as it might be. And it’s not just about that, either--Dante’s not entirely sure that he could be sitting here, flipping through the pages that his brother spent his life writing and beginning to understand the way he and his twin had grown apart, if Nero weren’t here with him.

Nero seems to know how Dante feels, even if Dante has shared exactly none of this out loud with the kid, and despite them having already stumbled across some pieces of rather important information, Nero is perfectly content to sort through the rest of Vergil’s storage unit before he begins to sort through his own problems.

So they settle into an easy routine, taking their time with everything. Once a week, or sometimes not at all, they go the unit and pick out books and clear a space on the dusty floor to read. Dante puts a sheaf of paper in between the pages of one of Vergil’s private journals to mark his place, knowing how his brother always hated the way Dante used to dog-ear the pages of his library books.

They leave the actual textbooks behind, but Dante always takes the private journals back with him, stacking the completed ones next to Lady’s gun in the bedroom drawer, right next to the pile of opened and read letters.

He feels like he understands his brother a little better when he looks through his personal notes. He sees now exactly how oriented Vergil had been around his goal of attaining ultimate power, matches it up with the ten-year-old Vergil with bruises on his arms and a cold hint of steel in the depths of his eyes.

His brother had been the older one, even if only by mere minutes, and so he’d taken it so deeply upon himself to care for Dante when their parents had gone. And the best way he’d thought to do it was to get stronger, even if his intentions had become drastically skewed and self-centered, towards the end. 

Vergil was almost surprisingly specific with his requirements for such--his brother held an evident, clear distaste for the concept of vampiric bonding.

_ Process of transfer of power appears to be heavily contingent upon emotional attachment. Extremely suboptimal.  _

Of course that sort of thing would be considered a huge drawback in Vergil’s mind, especially considering how closed-off his brother had been for most of their teenage and barely adult years. 

There’s another part, underneath it, that Dante doesn’t quite understand. It looks like a half-finished thought, like Vergil was attempting to form out of a hypothesis, but eventually abandoned it.

_ Appear to have once been humans, birthed from a combination of remainders of hatred in the mortal soul and the death of humanity. Perhaps, then, to solve the dilemma of immortality, one requires the reverse _

The sentence stops itself there, without punctuation or a clear end, and Vergil had continued along on the next line, on an entirely different train of thought.

_ Too difficult to dispose of once all resources have been extracted. And regeneration appears to be impossible to take by force,  _ Vergil had coldly noted near a paragraph about the miracles of vampiric healing, about the tenacity and sustainability of the biology of vampires that allowed them to survive through even the most fatal of wounds.

Dante reads over the same paragraph at breakfast one lazy Saturday morning, as Nero goes through the mail, looking down at his own arm. He’s certainly “extracted” this particular resource that Vergil had found so inaccessible. 

In the time since he’d received Nero’s gift of accelerated healing, he’s accidentally given himself papercuts, burned his hands or his tongue once or twice on a particularly hot piece of pizza, has garnered more than his fair share of bruises tripping over obstacles, and absolutely none of it--the pain or the resulting injury--has lasted for longer than a few seconds. 

He glances up at Nero, his eyes fixed on the bandage wrapped around the kid’s palm, where he’d cut himself while cutting up vegetables a couple days ago. Compared to how he’d been before, able to repair his entire spine when it’d been snapped in half, Nero is so painfully fragile. 

The kid’s told him again and again that it doesn’t bother him, and, considering the kid’s general opinion about his life, it really might not. 

But it bothers  _ Dante _ . So far, the further along they go, the more and more one-sided their bond seems to him, working almost entirely in his favor.

Dante doesn’t want it to be like this--he wants to be able to do right by Nero.

“Hey--I’ve been meaning to ask,” Nero says slowly as he crunches through his traditional breakfast cereal, carefully drawing Dante’s attention away from his thoughts.

Dante looks up from his third cup of coffee, rubbing blearily at his eyes, gently turning the journal in his hand face down on the table, far away from any place where it could get messed up or stained.

“What’s up, kid?”

Nero doesn’t answer right away, sticking his spoon of marshmallow cereal into his mouth and chewing contemplatively as he frowns at the card in his hands. It’s some shitty dollar-store discount thing, sent to him by one of the stores with his mailing address in a desperate bid for early Christmas advertisement. Nero swallows and taps his finger against the top of the card, looking at Dante seriously.

“Who’s this? I see this dude everywhere.”

Dante nearly burns his throat with how fast he swallows his coffee as he leans over in an attempt to get a better look at the card, to confirm that Nero is actually asking what Dante he thinks he is. Because if Nero  _ really  _ just doesn’t know, then Dante has a lot of work cut out for him this month.

“Nero, you mean...are you talking about  _ Santa? _ ”

The blank look on Nero’s face shifts to one of faint recognition, the confusion in his eyes turning a little more thoughtful.

“Oh, is that what he looks like? I guess I’ve heard his name a couple of times…” Nero narrows his gaze, picking up the card again, then looking between Dante and the picture of cartoon Santa on the front. Then, in a very matter-of-fact tone, Nero announces:

“He looks like you.”

_ “What?” _

Nero looks at him flatly, like the answer should be obvious.

“Same fashion sense. White hair. Scruffy and unshaven. The red coat, too.”

He isn’t sure what type of emotion rushes through him at Nero’s brutally honest comparison between him and a fictional anthropomorphic candy cane, but he feels like he should be maybe offended, or at least a little defensive. 

“Okay, first, it’s not the same--you’re blind, kid. Second, I wear it better.”

Nero gives him a very slow once over, a healthy amount of fake skepticism entering his eyes. 

“If that’s what you wanna tell yourself. He’s gotta be at least twenty, no,  _ thirty  _ years younger than you, though.”

Dante leans over the table, snatching the card out of the kid’s fingers and shoving it underneath a stack of nearby papers, if only to stop the smirk spreading across Nero’s face at the source.

“Complete untruths aside, you’ve never seen Santa?” 

That’s...kind of sad, if Dante is honest. Then again, Santa probably wasn’t a thing back when Nero was still alive, and if Nero has been wandering around in isolation all these years, it makes sense he wouldn’t have been exposed very much to the cultural side of the holidays. He wouldn’t have had anyone to celebrate it with, anyway.

Nero looks more than a little self-conscious, hastily stuffing his mouth full of cereal and staring down at the table so he won’t have to meet Dante’s gaze. His cheeks are slightly puffed out, visible even underneath the scarf that Nero has taken to wearing at nearly all times of the day, and Dante can’t help but chuckle at the sight, trying to shove away the sadness lurking in the bottom of his heart.

The kid wouldn’t want his pity, anyway.

“I mean...I never saw this guy around when I was alive. Does it have to do with the time of month?”

Dante scratches at his jaw, trying to figure out the best way to explain this sort of thing. His own parents had told him and Vergil about Santa when they were about four years old, in a talk that Dante doesn’t really remember. He sure wishes he’d paid more attention, though--after their parents had died, the two of them had never really gotten the chance to celebrate any of the holidays in foster care.

“Uh, well...you know what Christmas is, right?”

Nero tilts his head in confusion, blinking honestly at him, and Dante takes a long sip of his coffee, setting it back down and taking off his glasses to rub at his face.

“Well...there’s a whole story behind it, but I won’t get too deep into that. Basically, people get together and give each other presents. Spend time with the family and friends and all that. It’s a real nice occasion.”

Dante neglects to mention that he’s spent about the past ten Christmases of his life too drunk to remember them, alone for most of the day, save for when Lady and Trish dropped by in the morning with gifts for his sorry ass.

Nero is nodding like understands, though, so Dante’s explanation of things can’t have been too pathetic.

“Okay...so how does a….big red guy factor into this?” 

Right.

Dante opens his mouth, ready to explain to a nineteen-year-old immortal vampire that Santa isn’t real, but when he looks at the open, honest curiosity on the kid’s face, he can’t help but want to have a little fun. Nero will forgive him later, he’s sure. 

Making sure to keep his face as serious as possible, he begins, “Basically, he, uh...he comes to your house and brings you shit.”

Nero chokes on his cereal, looking more than a little alarmed at this new discovery, his eyes wide and uncertain. Dante would feel a little bad about how easily Nero seems to believe him, but to be fair, Nero is a  _ vampire _ , living in a world full of other supernatural creatures who regularly defy realistic expectations.

For someone who’s never heard of Santa, in this kind of circumstance, Dante can see how it wouldn’t be too hard to accept that he was real.

“He--what? Without your permission? How does he get in?”

“Through your chimney, more or less,” Dante says, trying his absolute hardest not to laugh as he leans back, thoroughly enjoying the increasing amounts of confusion on the kid’s face. 

“What? Isn’t he... _ big? _ I don’t think he can fit in a hole like that.”

Dante triple-checks Nero for any sign that the kid is putting him on, but Nero is so absolutely, painfully innocent that Dante is forced to look away, covering his smile with his coffee cup.

“You’d be surprised at what can fit in a hole, Nero,” Dante replies lightly. If Trish or Lady were around now, he’d be smashed face first into the hardwood floor for the way he’s playing around with Nero’s innocence. 

Nero doesn’t seem to catch on, which is pretty understandable, all things considered. The kid  _ did  _ grow up in a religious settlement, of sorts.

“Well...so, he just comes and gives people presents? Why would he do that? How does he know what to get you? He does this for  _ everyone?” _ Nero demands, looking more and more frustrated with each question that comes from his mouth.

Dante shrugs easily, relaxing back in his chair and folding his hands behind his head.

“It’s his job, kind of. And he knows what to get you because that’s just his thing. He’s got a list--he watches you and looks at whatever you do, you see, if he thinks you’re being a bad person, he won’t get you anything.”  

Nero’s expression shifts to something more on the side of duly alarmed and just a little terrified, and Dante can see him swallow hard, eyes shifting unconsciously towards the Christmas card still peeking out from underneath the stack of papers.

“What the  _ fuck, _ ” Nero mutters softly underneath his breath. “I didn’t...know. So...he’s always watching you? Is he like a  _ god  _ or some shit? Is this why they keep putting... _ idols _ of him up everywhere?”

Dante vaguely recalls that they’ve driven past the mall quite a few times on his way to work, and that the place had put up a gigantic inflatable effigy of Santa near their front entrance, for everyone to see. Nero had stared at it in silence each time they’d passed by it, but Dante hadn’t connected Nero’s uncharacteristic muteness with the idea that the kid just didn’t know about Santa at all.

“Uh, I guess you could say that. Don’t worry, though,” he says, savoring the quite worried look on Nero’s face. “He’s not watching you  _ all  _ the time. That’s what his elves are for.”

“His  _ what?” _

Nero’s tone is so aghast with obvious horror that Dante can no longer keep up the act, nearly snorting out his coffee as he laughs.

It’s so stupid, but he hasn’t felt this free and light in a long, long time, and he has to double over, clutching at his aching stomach as he wipes at the corner of his eyes.

Nero watches him in confusion, which quickly turns into a glare of righteous irritation as the realization dawns on the kid. He snatches up a napkin and wipes off the areas that Dante had accidentally spat on, before petulantly tossing the dirty napkin at Dante’s face.

“I can’t believe you, you...you fucking  _ dinosaur!”  _ Nero is a bright red, his cheeks flushed with embarrassment as he clearly replays the contents of their conversation in his head. “I seriously thought...ugh!”

The kid groans, covering his face with both hands, pushing up his fluffy bangs with the motion, and Dante chuckles, before wrapping his hands around Nero’s wrists and carefully lowering them. Nero doesn’t resist, but averts his gaze to the table, puffing his cheeks out in an almost-pout.

Nero is just too adorable. It’s not Dante’s fault that he can’t help himself.

He tips Nero’s head upwards and gently kisses him, smiling against the boy’s lips when he feels Nero shyly return the gesture, his actions rather inexperienced, but still enthusiastic.

“Sorry, I just couldn’t resist,” Dante says, quite unapologetically, as he pulls away, and Nero folds his arms across his chest, ducking his head into his scarf.

“That’s the last time I’m ever asking your useless ass to explain something. Next time, I’m just gonna go to Lady and Trish.”

“Hey, hey, it wasn’t  _ all  _ lies, you know. Santa might not be real, but Christmas is still an actual thing. People actually give each other presents and hang out and all that.”

Nero looks at him suspiciously, but whatever he sees in Dante’s eyes makes him uncross his arms, something like a faint excitement entering his eyes. The kid is obviously trying not to show it, but the idea of something like this clearly has him interested. 

In that case, Dante has no choice but to make sure Nero has his very first Christmas, and a good one, at that.

Despite having nearly the entirety of December to execute his plan, trying to find an appropriate gift for Nero is exceedingly difficult, and doing it without the kid knowing when they spend nearly every waking moment together is even harder.

But through a combination of Lady and Trish acting as distractions and an assload of gradable exam papers to keep Nero busy, he manages to pull it off, wrapping up Nero’s gift and stuffing it carefully in his locked bedroom drawer, the one that Nero never goes in, despite knowing exactly what’s in it. The kid has always respected Dante’s privacy without Dante needing to ask, and it’s a trait that benefits him, now more than ever. 

So when Dante leads Nero back to his apartment on the night of Christmas Eve, the falling snow still clinging to Nero’s long lashes and forcing the kid to rub at his eyes, Nero is thoroughly shocked when he looks up to see Lady and Trish already inside, sitting next to a miniature plastic Christmas tree, with various wrapped boxes placed underneath. 

“What--?” Nero appears to lose his voice shortly after getting out that single word, looking wide-eyed between Dante’s face and the rest of the apartment, and Dante lowers his head, an impossibly fond smile crossing his face as he gently places a hand against Nero’s lower back.

“You’ve never had a Christmas before. So I figured you should.”

Nero’s gaze turns a little lost, and he bites down hard on his lip, his eyes suspiciously shiny. He pulls up his scarf in front of his mouth, trying to hide his face in it, and Dante gently nudges him forward.

“Besides, I just like getting gifts. Who doesn’t? And Lady and Trish always get me something nice.”

“More than he deserves, that’s for sure,” Lady comments from the background, but both of the girls have quite warm looks on their face, their expressions soft as they look over Nero, who has given up on hiding his smile.

Nero doesn’t allow himself to fully smile very often, either out of reluctance or out of self-consciousness, so in the rare opportunities that Dante gets to see the full force of Nero’s radiant happiness, he certainly savors them. 

“Usually, you eat a fancy dinner for this kind of thing. So I got us an extra-cheesy pizza. I even put olives on half of it--I know, I know, I shouldn’t have. But I’m willing to make the sacrifice.”

Nero laughs, a clear and pure sound, unrestricted by the fabric of his scarf or his hand for once, and Dante can see the way the kid practically bounces as he goes to sit next to Lady and Trish by the tree, curiously examining the names on the boxes.

“I, um...I didn’t get you guys anything...I didn’t know we were...doing this,” Nero quietly admits, looking somewhat ashamed, and all three of them shake their heads nearly simultaneously. 

“You didn’t have to, kid. It’s your first Christmas, after all. Maybe next time.” 

If there even  _ is  _ a next time, which Dante isn’t so certain about, but he isn’t about to point it out now, and Nero doesn’t seem to register the thought, too wrapped up in his excitement at getting to experience something so new to him.

“Don’t worry,” Trish assures him, patting him on the shoulder. “Dante is easy to please. Just get him something from the dollar store that doesn’t resemble an olive, and he’ll take it. Most of the time, he’s too busy stroking his own ego at his mediocre gifts to notice, anyway.”

“Hey, that hurts,” Dante plops onto the couch, folding his arms behind his head and putting his feet up. “I actually tried for this one. Sorta.”

“So you said last year, when you got us a box of pizza,” Lady stares at him flatly, the memory of Dante’s drunken efforts having clearly not escaped her notice.

“Pizza is a gift to mankind in general. Besides, I made it up to you afterward, didn't I? You two got your promised shopping trip.”

He keeps his tone casual, but the truth is, he really did try for this one. He’s spent at least a full week of his time wracking his brain for some kind of gift for Nero, something that wouldn’t seem stupid or cheap or materialistic. 

Only the gifts that mean something are the ones worth giving, after all.

There’s a knock at the door, presumably from whatever poor pizza delivery person is working on Christmas Eve, and Nero gets to his feet, snatching a few loose dollar bills from their change jar to tip the person. Dante notes the way that Nero takes nearly twice the amount as usual, probably out of kindness for the person, and decides to let it go.

While Nero is chatting away with the delivery person and probably forcing his extra large tip on them, Lady takes the opportunity to reach underneath the tree, examining the boxes.

“You sure about this, Dante?” Trish asks, an eyebrow raises, and he follows her gaze to the box under the tree from him, with Nero’s name on it. 

She and Lady both know what’s inside, and they’re two of out of the only three people left on this Earth who could know what the contents mean to Dante.

“Well, it’s been doing a good job as a dust collector for all these years, but I’d rather see it put to good use. And I trust the kid with it--I want him to have it.”

There’s something unusually soft in the way the girls look at him then, and he rubs his hand over his face, feeling suddenly embarrassed.

“Yeah, I’m amazing. I already knew that. Time to move on.”

“Move on from what?” Nero asks as he re-enters the room, the pizza box in his hands, and Dante immediately sits up, eager to both divert Nero’s attention from the topic at hand and to eat the non-olive infested half of the pizza.

“Well, Lady was just telling me about this wart she found on her breasts--”

Nero flushes a bright red with startling speed, unable to help the way that his gaze drifts to Lady’s general chest area before he looks away so quickly that Dante can almost hear the bones in his neck crack from the whiplash. 

Cute.

Lady snatches a plastic ornament off of the tree and tosses it at Dante’s chest, the object smacking against his muscles and bouncing harmlessly off, but Dante gets the message from the promise of death in her eyes alone.

“See, this is why I said to move on,” Dante quips as he holds his hands up, starting towards the pizza, which Nero attempts to hand to him while still looking away from Lady, requiring quite a bit of effort on Dante’s part. 

The pizza itself isn’t too different from the ones they’ve always had, but something about sitting with his two closest friends and Nero on the floor and watching as Nero laughs at something Trish or Lady says, free from the burdens of his immortal life in this one night, makes it taste especially good. 

Dante spends a long time staring at Nero’s kind smile, trying to memorize the sight for when the kid will inevitably return to covering his expressions up when his spell of all-consuming happiness wears off.

It’s the best gift he’s ever gotten for Christmas, really, which is the sappiest thing he’d never thought he’d say or think, but it’s true. He’s more than a little lovestruck, maybe, but Nero just makes him feel like everything in his life is falling into place.

Trish and Lady stay with them until past midnight, until Nero starts looking sleepy again and the two of them, seeing this, decide to take their leave, their gifts from Dante in hand. He’s done a better job for the both of them this year--or at least he hopes so.

They give the both of them that strange, soft look again that makes Dante’s insides squirm uncomfortably as he rubs at the back of his neck, averting his gaze. He doesn’t feel shy very often, but being looked at like  _ that  _ from two of the toughest and probably scariest women in the world is enough to do it.

Dante closes the door behind them, a lasting silence falling over the apartment as he stands looking at Nero for a long moment, who is fiddling with the ends of his scarf, seemingly lost in thought.

“So...we should probably get you to bed, huh?” Dante offers, walking over to where the kid is still sitting on the floor and holding out a hand to him.

Nero looks at it for a moment before he takes it in his own, allowing Dante to pull him up and guide him to the bedroom that they’ve started sharing somewhere down along the line. 

The kid disappears into the bathroom, probably to brush his teeth, and Dante runs a hand through his hair before stripping off his shirt, folding it up and dropping it on the top of his dresser. 

Organizing his clothes is somewhat of a novel invention to him, but ever since Nero had taken a permanent spot on the other side of his bed, the kid had set about tirelessly fixing up Dante’s wardrobe, with about the same efficiency that he’d fixed the other screwed up parts of Dante’s life.

He’s sitting on the edge of his bed, pulling at a loose thread on his sheets when Nero exits the bathroom, dressed in one of Dante’s own button-up shirts and his boxers. The kid is small enough that Dante’s shirt nearly drapes down to his mid-thigh, and Dante suddenly feels his throat turn dry, uncomfortably aware of the beat of his own heart, picking up its pace in his chest.

“I, um...thank you, Dante,” Nero says softly, looking oddly hesitant as he inches a little closer to him. “For real. I haven’t had something that nice happen to me in a long while.”

Dante nods, trying to keep his eyes on Nero’s face and nowhere lower, but Nero’s gaze is trained on the ground, his hands curled loosely at his sides.

“I wasn’t really tired,” Nero continues, in that same, soft tone, and the admission has Dante’s mind scrambling to keep up, trying not to fill in the blank left behind with what he so desperately is starting to hope for.

“I just wanted us to be alone.”

Dante stands up automatically, and Nero comes closer to him again, until he’s near enough that Dante can see each of Nero’s white eyelashes that frame his nervous gaze. With a motion slow enough that Nero can stop him or move away if he wants, Dante curves a hand around Nero’s waist, pulling him in a little closer and tilting the boy’s head up with the other.

Nero presses himself shyly against Dante, leaning into the touch, and looking determinedly up at him.

“I’ve never...done this before. You probably know that.”

Dante swallows hard, lowering his head slightly. 

“Yeah. I figured.”

He backs the two of them up, until the backs of Nero’s knees touch the bed, and the boy sits on the edge, one of his hands loosely wrapping around Dante’s forearm. Dante looks at him, searches Nero’s face for any sign of doubt or unease, but there’s only that same, warm, unbreakable trust flickering in Nero’s eyes.

The kid doesn’t look away as he tugs lightly on Dante’s forearm, scooting further backward on the bed.

“Can you show me how?” 

Dante obeys Nero’s silent request, following the kid onto the bed until he’s leaning over Nero, one of his knees in between the kid’s parted thighs, his hands on either side of Nero’s head. Nero’s fluffy hair spills out onto the pillow as he lays underneath Dante, finally feeling shy enough to break eye contact with him.

“If you really want this, I’d be happy to, Nero.”

Nero nods, but Dante doesn’t move any further until Nero voices his verbal consent, encouraging Dante to lower his head and gently kiss Nero, trailing his lips down to Nero’s neck, sucking lightly at the skin as the kid squirms underneath him.

“Tell me if it hurts. Or if you want me to stop.”

Nero tangles his fingers in Dante’s hair, parting his legs further to make more room for Dante to properly settle in between them.

“I trust you,” Nero says simply.

Dante goes slow, because it’s Nero’s first time and because it’s his own first time doing it with someone that means this much to him. 

Nero arches up into his touch, his nails raking blunt scratches down the broad surface of Dante’s back as Dante moves inside of him, muffling his own groans into the crook of Nero’s neck as Nero breathlessly gasps underneath him.

He twines his fingers with Nero’s own at one point, tenderly pressing the boy’s hand down into the sheets as he leaves gentle kisses across Nero’s face, swallowing up Nero’s noises into his own mouth.

“Dante--” Nero whispers out, tears pricking at the corner of his eyes, and Dante looks down at him, stopping his movements for the barest of seconds, waiting for what Nero wants to tell him.

Nero shivers underneath his touch, swallowing hard before he continues in that same, breathy voice.

“I think--I think I love you.”

Dante doesn’t answer right away. He doesn’t have to, because Nero knows how Dante feels, knows it when he hooks a hand underneath one of Nero’s thighs, opening him up further, and pushes in again, hissing out Nero’s name against his neck while the boy cries out.

Nero goes limp underneath him when he finishes, and Dante reaches his end soon after, staying on top of Nero, but being careful not to crush him. He leans his forehead down against Nero’s, feeling the kid’s long eyelashes brush against his face, and he sighs out gently, reaching up a hand to brush his thumb against Nero’s cheek.

They stay like that for a comfortable moment, until Dante carefully pulls out and rolls to the side, wrapping Nero up in his arms with him.

The boy settles in comfortably against him, his head pressed against Dante’s slowing heartbeat, his eyelids already fluttering shut. 

“I love you too, kid,” Dante murmurs softly as he gently lowers his face against the top of Nero’s head, Nero’s fluffy hair tickling his jaw.

Nero mumbles out something that could be Dante’s name, but the kid is quickly asleep before he can elaborate any further, and Dante suppresses a chuckle, shutting his eyes but staying awake.

Nero loves him.

It’s a mixed bag of emotion, really. Because he’s never been so happy before, but also because, with startling clarity, he now better understands the road that lies ahead of them. 

_ Perhaps, then, to solve the dilemma of immortality, one requires the reverse _

Vergil had written it out for him, inked the solution of the question of Nero’s life straight into his own journal, and had then abandoned it. Because Vergil could never have imagined the reality that Dante finds himself in, the reality that the demon he bonded with could grow into humanity.

That the demon--that _ Nero _ \--could learn to love him.

But it’s real for Dante. 

Nero is very real in his arms, and the emotions and the trust that Nero has so freely offered to him is real, and the problem of Nero’s life--along with its potential solution--is more real than Dante ever wants it to be.

He tightens his arms around the kid because, even after what he now knows, he wants to be selfish for a little while longer. In the morning, he’ll sort things out properly, will force himself to look fully at the truth, and will let Nero decide how the rest of his own life will be.

For now, though, Nero is asleep, blissfully unaware of the truth, and Dante is rapidly sinking underneath with him. 

When Dante sleeps, he dreams of baby blue eyes, looking as young as they should be, set in an ageless future on that familiar precipice of the unknown.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AHSDFSHF SORRY FOR DELAY........I HAVE BEEN PREOCCUPIED W/ HORNY OTHER THINGS....OTHER DANEWO HORNY...........  
> BUT HERE WE GO

Looking at things from this side of the morning, things suddenly don’t seem so easy.

Dante awakens with Nero curled up against him, his mouth slightly open, his steady breaths fluttering against his fluffy strands of hair, tickling Dante’s bare skin with the motion. The kid looks happier and calmer than Dante’s ever seen him, unable to be touched by the shadows of his two thousand years of life in his sleep. 

Slowly, Dante reaches up, nestling a hand in Nero’s hair, a soft smile curling at his lips at the way Nero’s expression twitches at the contact, and the boy makes some sort of pitiful grumbling noise before rolling over and burying his face properly into Dante’s chest. He has to force away the chuckle that threatens to escape him at Nero’s uncharacteristically clingy behavior, and the moment is so warm that he almost forgets about what he’d promised himself he’d do.

Almost.

Dante shuts his eyes again, half-hoping his body will take over and he’ll drift back into sleep, so that he won’t have to deal with this, but he’s as indecently unlucky as always.

“Dante?” Nero murmurs, and Dante feels the faint brush of Nero’s face against his skin as the kid tilts his head upwards, blinking owlishly at him through those baby blue eyes. 

He thinks about pretending to still be asleep, but Nero always knew when he was awake, anyway. Cracking open an eye, he tries to look down, watching as Nero rubs at his eyes and combs his fingers through his hair before gingerly sitting up. After about half a moment of silence between them, a pink flush crawls up the back of Nero’s neck and dusts his cheeks, and the kid’s hand automatically goes to his neck, reaching for a scarf that isn’t there.

Without anything to hide his face, Nero ducks his head and looks away from him, curling in on himself with embarrassment.

“Morning, kid,” Dante decides to open up the conversation, with a relative amount of practiced caution. 

Nero certainly doesn’t seem to be regretting their night together, but the kid’s always been awfully shy about his own feelings, and, in the wake of broad daylight, it’s pretty hard to ignore the evidence of what they’ve just done. Dante knows Nero pretty well at this point--no matter how close they’ve gotten, in pretty much every sense of the word, if he pushes too hard on this matter and embarrasses Nero beyond his tolerance point, the kid will shut down and bolt like a startled rabbit.

“You, uh...you want breakfast?”

Nero’s head turns towards him a little too quickly as he bites down on his lip, his fingers curling and uncurling in his lap. The kid seems to think it over for at least a couple minutes before eventually deciding that this conversation would indeed be easier with a bowl of his favorite marshmallow cereal acting as a barrier between them.

“You’re seriously hungry already?” Nero questions, which Dante takes to understand as a very Nero-esque sort of agreement. “You had way more pizza than anyone else last night...I can’t believe you.”

His grumbles trail off underneath his breath as the kid swings his legs over the edge of the bed, gently sliding off of the mattress, a slight wince crossing his features as he properly puts his weight on his feet. Dante sees the way Nero’s left hand twitches instinctively, about to touch at his lower back before the kid visibly pauses in his movements, instead reaching for the hem of the borrowed shirt he’s still wearing, tugging it downwards. 

Dante is half expecting Nero to change out of his shirt, but the kid only looks down at himself, fingers fiddling with the too-large collar of the button-up. He can’t see Nero’s face from here, but the tips of the kid’s ears are very red, and Dante can’t help but smirk.

“It’s a good look for you,” he drawls, deeply enjoying the way that Nero automatically tugs the shirt down even further, twisting his head to look at him with a glare.

“Shut up,” Nero retorts, without much heat to the response, as he very tenderly crosses the room, crouching down and recovering his boxers from where Dante had rather haphazardly tossed them somewhere in the middle of the events of last night. 

“I’m not taking fashion advice from an old-ass  _ clown  _ like you.”

“Clown?” Dante asks, running a hand through his hair as he properly sits up, trying to keep his staring to a minimum as Nero wiggles back into his underwear. “That’s going a bit far, wouldn’t you think?”

Nero rights himself, crossing his arms over his chest as he turns back towards Dante, slowly slipping back into his comfort zone as they trade remarks back and forth, much to Dante’s relief.

“Dante, I saw your high school yearbook photos. I don’t know who told you that wearing a fucking  _ belt  _ over your nipples instead of a shirt was a good idea, but you really shouldn’t listen to them ever again.”

“I have a high school yearbook?”

Dante has no memory of this mythical book, but he supposes it found its way into his moving boxes at one point or another, and he’d just never bothered to unpack it. In the months that they’ve been living together, Nero’s been rummaging around through his things and cleaning his shit up for him, so it’s not too far of a stretch to imagine that the kid could have found the thing.

He does, however, remember the infamous belt that Nero is speaking of, and in his opinion, it’s really not as bad as the kid’s disgusted tone makes it sound.

Vergil had hated it too, actually. Dante faintly recalls the look of mingled despair and repulsion on his twin brother’s face when he’d come down the stairs with it on for the first time.

_ If anyone ever inquires, _ his brother had said, turning away to pour himself a cup of coffee, shaking his head with the depths of his disappointment.  _ Feel free to deny our blood relation. _

Dante finds himself smiling fondly at the memory, too thoroughly engrossed in his reminiscence to dodge out of the way of the pair of his pants that Nero throws into his face.

“At least you grew out of it. It probably wouldn’t fit on you anymore, thank god. If people saw you running around with that on, I’d have no choice but to pretend that I didn’t know you, for my own sake.”

Dante pretends to sigh as he pushes the covers completely off of him, his smirk widening at Nero’s abrupt, strangled sort of noise at the unobstructed sight of Dante’s lower half.

“You people just don’t understand me, is all. It was the peak of fashion, back in the day. I’m sure you wouldn’t understand, kid.”

“Oh, I understand that it was the peak that everyone went up to in order to throw themselves off of, probably. Get dressed already, clown.”

Nero shakes his head and turns away again, but not quickly enough to hide the shy smile that graces his face. Dante rubs at his neck, stretching out his stiff muscles, and obediently puts his pants on, watching as Nero, still wearing Dante’s shirt, disappears through the bedroom door and into the kitchen, probably to get a headstart on his cereal.

With the kid gone and his mind fully awake, it’s a little harder to ignore the guilt that eats away at him. He’s standing here with a very big potential lead on Nero’s current mortality problem in his hands, and yet he’s still bickering back and forth with the boy, trying to convince himself, more than anything, that things are still normal.

He’s going to tell Nero eventually, that much is certain. But the question of  _ when  _ he does it is a little more unclear.

He wants more time with Nero, which in of itself isn’t a crime, but Nero’s waited two thousand years for something like this to come up, and it’d be more than a little cruel of Dante to knowingly let him wait much longer. The biggest problem, though, is that Dante isn’t even entirely sure if he can trust the information that he now has, if the conclusion he’s come to is even the right one.

The most concrete evidence he has of his theory is Vergil’s half-formed thought, really, and Dante isn’t about to go and ask his brother what he meant or what he was thinking, refuses to touch on a subject of this nature with the other. It’s not like he’d be able to even if he was willing, anyway--all their mail is definitely being read and their conversations are supervised, and if the authorities caught wind of Dante talking about demonic bonding and death with his former mass-murderer brother, Vergil would quickly find himself with a new roommate.

With Nero’s honest confession from last night, the answer really shouldn’t be too hard, anyway. It’s exactly as his brother had written it--if a human dies, and allows their humanity to disappear along with their life, then, motivated out of spite, revenge, and potentially hatred, they choose to turn into a vampire. 

Then, in the event of vampiric death, with all the reverse qualifications fulfilled, the opposite choice might present itself. Nero’s definitely done enough at this point to let go of the demonic, supernatural aspects of himself, but even still, it seems awfully far-fetched.

The opposite of death is life, the opposite of humanity is inhumanity, and the opposite of hatred is...love?

So, hypothetically, all things considered, a peaceful, complete death for Nero could now be accessible, all because the kid managed to fall in love with him.

It sounds like a bad romance novel, the kind he’d caught Vergil reading and openly weeping over in the middle of the night, back in their teenage years, when his brother thought Dante couldn’t see him.

Dante groans softly, scratching at his jaw and staring hard at the floor beneath him. He wishes he had some way to know for sure, both because he thinks he’d feel at least a little better if he knew what he was going into, and because he doubts that Nero can afford to take a gamble on this sort of thing.

He can still remember how soft and subdued the kid had sounded when he’d told Dante about what it’d been like to die--painful, with an uncertain end. The look in Nero’s eyes when he’d described the state of suspended animation he’d been trapped in isn’t one that Dante can forget, much less simply put aside here. 

One of the biggest things preventing Nero from getting what he wants is his fear of not knowing where he’ll end up, and if Dante can’t find clear solution to that problem, he’s better off not presenting this information to Nero at all. 

“Yo, Dante!” Nero calls, his voice slightly muffled, evidently already speaking around a mouthful of cereal. “It takes you  _ this  _ long to put on your pants?”

Despite himself, Dante chuckles, rubbing at the back of his head as he properly exits the bedroom, meeting Nero’s somewhat annoyed glare as the boy crunches impatiently on his breakfast. Either he’s been standing in his room and thinking for longer than he thought, or Nero is just getting faster at this kind of thing, because Dante’s own breakfast is laid out for him too, steam curling off of the edge of a mug of coffee, and a plate of microwaved pizza right next to it.

“Sorry, kid. You know how it is.”

“No,” Nero grumbles, but Dante sees the way the kid’s gaze is focused on his face, his teeth worrying his bottom lip nervously.

Nero waits until Dante’s taken at least three bites of his pizza before he clears his throat awkwardly. His fingers grasp at the place where his scarf usually is again, the involuntary motion a clear indication of the kid’s nervousness. Dante waits patiently for Nero to speak up, raising his still hot cup of coffee to his lips.

“The, um...the...last night,” Nero begins, his words growing softer and more rushed the further along he gets. 

“Was it... _ good _ for you?”

Dante swallows his coffee quickly, his eyes watering at the sudden burn as he looks carefully at Nero, who seems to have all but disappeared behind the cereal box. Only the top of his head is visible, his messy hair fluffing up and poking out from above the rainbow cardboard barrier Nero’s put between the two of them.

“Uh,” Dante ventures slowly, because this is an invariably sensitive sort of topic and he really doesn’t want to step the wrong way on ice as thin as this. “You mean…?”

He half expects Nero to snap at him, but he only hears a faint shuffling as Nero fidgets in place, breathing out a loud sigh through his mouth before a hand reaches out and gently pushes the cereal box to the side. Nero’s face is red enough to blend in with Dante’s coat, but the boy’s expression is determined, nonetheless. 

“I  _ mean _ did you...did you enjoy it? Like...I’ve never done it before, but you obviously have. I didn’t really know what I was doing. So I get it if you thought it was…”

Nero’s insecurity is obvious, and Dante reaches across the table before Nero can finish his sentence with a potentially self-deprecating description, gently taking his free hand. The kid instantly clamps his mouth shut, accidentally letting go of his spoon in his surprise, and stares up at Dante with something akin to mingled hope and hesitation. 

“Look, kid, I’ll spare you the probably unwanted details of my past encounters, but trust me when I say I liked it. I definitely don’t plan on doing this with anyone other than you anymore, that’s for sure.”

Nero seems actually surprised by his response and makes several false starts in trying to respond before he eventually ducks his head and looks away.

“Well...good! Because I...I guess I liked it, too.”

Dante feels the smirk returns to his face as he leans forward casually, unable to suppress the urge to poke fun at the kid. It wasn’t his fault that Nero got so unbearably adorable when he was embarrassed. It was just nature’s law, and Dante was certainly going to obey it.

“Oh, I could tell. You definitely weren’t shy about asking for more when--”

Nero abruptly makes a strangled sort of squawking noise as he snatches up the empty cereal box and tosses it at Dante’s face, the feather-light cardboard losing altitude along the way and bouncing uselessly off of his still bare chest. The action does absolutely nothing to quell the wave of absolute smugness that Dante is riding on, especially not when Nero, in the absence of his scarf, buries his face into his hands and sinks lower in his chair.

“Clearly, I made a mistake,” he hears the boy mumble from behind his hands, and Dante chuckles out loud, taking a casual sip from his coffee and assuming an expression of innocence.

“Feeling overwhelmed? I don’t blame you--but I’m definitely up for a round two whenever you are.”

Nero slowly lowers his hands to glare up at him, but says nothing to deny the possibility of having another bedtime tryst with Dante, although Dante certainly can’t guarantee that their next time will be in a bed at all.

“I’m going to go back to eating my cereal now, and you’re going to go deflate your gigantic head, okay?” Nero says, in the sort of tone that left no room for argument, and Dante shrugs good-naturedly, draining the rest of his coffee and picking up his slice of pizza.

He has to admit that, while the fact that Nero had trusted and loved him enough to let him in so close is definitely heartwarming and speaks volumes as to how far the two of them have come, it’s also a pretty extreme ego boost for Dante that he’d been the one to break Nero’s two-thousand-year streak of virginity. 

So he’s not entirely sure how deflated his head is when Nero finishes the last of his cereal and looks up again, his gaze drifting to where the tiny tree is still standing, sheltering three gift-wrapped boxes beneath its plastic needles.

Right.

Nero doesn’t actually say anything, probably still too uncertain on how this whole “Christmas” process works and definitely way too stubborn to expose how excited he actually probably is, but Dante takes the hint all the same, hoping that his nervousness doesn’t show on his face.

As much time as he’d spent looking for a gift, he’s still not actually all that confident in it. It’s definitely valuable--to him, at least, but he has no idea if Nero will see it the same way. Besides, with a pure, sweet kid like Nero, who pretty much deserved the world and more, no gift was really good enough in Dante’s estimation.

Sitting up a little straighter, he gently nudges Nero’s bare foot with his own, motioning towards the presents with a tilt of his head. 

“Now’s the time to open them, if you’re curious. Although I’m pretty sure one of them is from the girls to me--they try to secretly murder me every year, so I wouldn’t recommend opening that one. Yours should be good, though. They love you.”

Nero’s cheeks are still flushed a pale pink, and he shyly swipes at his nose before getting out of his chair, properly washing out his cereal bowl and placing it in the dish rack to dry. With another careful glance at Dante, he lightly steps over to the presents, sitting cross-legged on the floor and picking up the largest box.

It isn’t Dante’s--Dante’s is a much smaller one, pale blue and wrapped with a dark ribbon, so it must be from the girls. They hadn’t told him what they’d gotten Nero, so it’ll be a surprise for Dante, too. He just hopes it isn’t a jar of olives or something else that will turn the kid against him.

“So...wait,” Nero begins, looking more than a little lost. “I just...open it?” 

The kid uncertainly picks at the colorful gift wrap on the outside of the box, placing one hand on the cartoon snowman printed at the top.

“Uh, yeah. That’s the idea, at least.”

Nero bites at his lip for a moment longer, before gently tucking his fingers underneath the folded edges at the sides, carefully peeling off the tape. It’s the slowest gift unwrapping that Dante’s ever witnessed, and when Nero is done and has the full box uncovered, the kid sets the present down, taking a moment to fold the wrapping paper up into a neat square so that the cartoon snowman faces upwards.

Fuck.

Dante tries to pretend like he’s not having heart palpitations over Nero’s unbelievable purity, but it’s awfully hard to do, especially when Nero looks down at the wrapping paper with such an attached, tender expression, like he can’t believe someone would go through all the trouble of making a box look nice for him.

Instead, he tries to distract himself by watching Nero pop open the box and carefully extract what appears to be a large stuffed rabbit from the inside. It’s roughly the size of Nero’s entire upper half, and it’s one of those hand-crafted, custom made ones too, because it’s got a very familiar looking miniature scarf around its neck and very blue eyes.

Ordinarily, it probably wasn’t the kind of present you’d get a physically nineteen-year old boy, even if one discounted the two thousand years in his favor. But from the way Nero looks at it with such softness in his face, petting its head between its floppy ears, it seems like the kid’s never held a stuffed animal in his life. Dante’s pretty certain that if he weren’t sitting right here and bearing witness to this, Nero would abandon all restraint and fully cuddle the thing.

Just when Dante’s wondering if he should go up to the fridge and bury his head in it to give the kid a moment of privacy with his new rabbit companion, the kid sets the stuffed bunny aside and peers back down into the box again. Suddenly, Dante has a terrible feeling in his gut, one that is only compounded when Nero extricates a flat, rectangular object from the inside.

He sees the way Nero’s eyes widen from a first look alone, and the kid’s hands literally tremble as he brings the picture frame closer to his face an expression of unadulterated shock crossing his face as his skin appears to lose all color. When Nero looks back up at him, something like an expression of terrified hilarity crossing his face, Dante sneaks a look at the contents of the frame.

Immediately, he feels like he’s been smashed over the head with a box of pizza--or maybe the entire pizza parlor.

“What...what the  _ fuck  _ happened to you?” Nero asks, in a choked sort of voice, the laughter evident in his tone as he stares down at the incriminating photo of Dante at his absolute worst.

Dante practically leaps out of his chair, crossing the room at top speed, but Nero immediately jumps upright, clutching the picture frame close to his chest and jumping on top of the couch to twist out of the way of Dante’s desperate hands, a wild laugh escaping him.

“I  _ swear  _ I destroyed the last copy!” Dante can picture Lady and Trish’s faces now, filled with vindictive glee for all the years of shit Dante’s put them through. 

“Give me that, kid!”

Nero shakes his head frantically, but is starting to laugh so hard that he’s forced to collapse on the couch. He pries the picture away from his chest for a brief second to glance down at him, before bursting into a fresh round of cackling.

“This  _ has  _ to be fake-- _ please _ tell me it’s fake.”

Unfortunately for him, it isn’t fake. 

Some time in his early twenties, around this time of year, he’d made the incredibly ill-advised and alcohol-influenced decision to star in an extremely low quality adult film. In his defense, it was mostly due to the fact that his girlfriend at the time, some whacked in the head theater loon whose name he barely remembered at this point, was both the script writer and the director for it. 

Due to the fact that she’d been inspired by “divine intervention” and possibly massive quantities of hallucinogens, the results had been devastatingly unfortunate, to say the least, but the picture that Nero is holding in his hands is a particularly bad shot of him, decked out in little more than the “Sexy Santa” outfit from the bargain bin at the Party Palooza store down the street.

As if haunted by his past shame, Dante can still feel his face itch at the phantom memory of the beard he’d drunkenly perma-glued to his face, but at least Nero hadn’t said anything about--

“I’ll make sure you have a White Christmas,” Nero reads off of the sign that Dante only vaguely remembers holding up in the picture, his voice bordering on the edge of hysteria. 

“I was drunk, I swear.”

“...So make sure to leave out your cookies for...for... _ Slutty Saint Nut.” _

Nero turns his eyes upwards, his lips moving soundlessly, and Dante takes a few seconds to realize that the kid is actually  _ praying _ , cradling the horrific photo very close to his heart.

Dante seizes the opportunity to reach forward and snatch at the picture, but Nero is still too fast for him, backing up into the corner of the couch, laughing too hard to be embarrassed by the way Dante nearly crawls on top of him, trying to destroy the photo.

Nero smacks at his chest, making a half-hearted attempt to push him away.

“Get off, grandpa! It’s mine, and I’m keeping it forever!” 

“You don’t need it!  _ The world  _ doesn’t need that!”

Dante has absolutely no idea how Lady and Trish managed to hold onto this copy for so long, but when he looks down at the kid’s face, as light and happy with laughter as it’d been last night, Dante loses most of his will to take the picture away from him, feeling a smile of his own cross his face. 

He maybe deserves this, anyway--he’s definitely gotten in his fair share of embarrassing Nero, for the sole purpose of seeing the kid’s cute flustered reactions. 

“Fine, fine, you can keep it. You’re just that special, kid. Though, if you start calling me by that name, we might have to reexamine some things.”

“I would never,” Nero says honestly, his face still filled with a wicked sort of glee.

He squirms underneath Dante after a minute, evidently having realized their positions now that the euphoria of seeing Dante’s hideous Christmas regalia is starting to wear off. With one arm still wrapped around his picture frame, he pushes at Dante’s chest again, the pink in his cheeks from laughter starting to turn slightly shy.

Nero is terrible for his self-control, honestly.

Dante leans down and kisses Nero gently, comfortably cupping his hand underneath the back of the boy’s head, feeling Nero’s fluffy hair tickle against the skin of his hand. Nero makes a muffled sort of squeak at the action, but doesn’t push away, returning the gesture with a little more confidence than he’d had prior to last night.

“I still haven’t opened your present yet,” Nero mumbles out underneath him when they break apart, and Dante reluctantly sits up, allowing Nero to wiggle from underneath him and set the cursed picture frame next to his stuffed rabbit, gently retrieving Dante’s gift.

He unwraps it with the same amount of care that he’d treated Lady and Trish’s gift with and pries open the small box. Dante watches nervously as Nero wraps the fragile chain of Vergil’s half of their mother’s final keepsake around his fingers, pulling the pendant all the way out,  before looking up at Dante with wide eyes.

“Isn’t this…?”

Dante nods, suddenly finding it a little difficult to speak. 

“Yeah. When my mother died, that’s pretty much all we had left of her. I got half, Vergil got the other. And he can’t have it where he is anymore.”

They’d confiscated it from Vergil when he’d been arrested, and when Dante had tried to bring it back to him, they’d stopped him before he could even set foot in the building. Vergil had perhaps done his job of obtaining power a little  _ too  _ well, because the authorities had been deathly afraid and greatly paranoid about Vergil owning  _ anything  _ from the outside, lest he somehow use it to his advantage.

Personally, Dante didn’t think Vergil would dare to do anything potentially destructive to their mother’s pendant even if he could, but he couldn’t exactly find a way to subvert the law, and in the end, Dante had never come back to see his brother anyway, so he’d just stashed it in his locked drawer and allowed it to collect dust.

Nero takes a long moment to find his words, nervously running his fingers through his hair and slowly shaking his head.

“But...this means a lot to you. I can’t take it.”

Dante rubs the back of his head, slowly moving to sit by Nero and taking the kid’s hand in his own, slowly closing Nero’s fingers around the pendant.

“The only kinds of gifts worth giving are the ones that mean something, kid. I trust you with it--it’s safer and better with you than anywhere else in the world.”

It’s a risky move, and highly dependent on personal value, but this is the only way he could think of to actually, physically show Nero what the kid means to him. Dante’s always felt that words, for the most part, were cheap, unless they were backed up by actions, a sentiment his brother and Nero both seem to share, and no amount of words will ever be able to express to Nero exactly the way Dante loves him, anyway. 

Nero stares wordlessly up at him before looking down at his lap, evidently unresponsive.

“Uh...I mean, if you hate it--”

Nero abruptly tugs his hand out of Dante’s grip before wrapping his arms around him in a hug tighter than he thought the kid was capable of, and Dante slowly curls his arms around the other, dropping his face down into the top of Nero’s fluffy hair.

“Thank you, Dante,” Nero whispers, in the softest voice that Dante’s ever heard him use.

Nero doesn’t have to say much more than that. The way that his voice catches in his throat is enough of an indication as to what he really wants to say.

He smiles against the top of Nero’s head, rubbing gentle circles into Nero’s back, appreciating how much space his hand takes up on the kid’s body and feeling Nero’s warmth against him.

But as close as they are to each other, Dante can only feel his own heart, beating steadily between them, while Nero’s body remains conspicuously silent, a reminder of the problem at hand.

And as hard as he tries to put all of it out of his mind for now, to forget the words that Vergil had written and the things that Nero had quietly admitted to him, something like guilt and worry gnaw away at the pit of his stomach, refusing to leave him alone.

“Sorry I didn’t get you anything,” Nero says softly, tilting his head up so that his baby blue eyes are looking innocently, obliviously into Dante’s own.

“Maybe next year, okay?”

Dante swallows hard, a painful tightness wrapping around his throat and strangling his words like vines.

“Yeah. Maybe next year.”

* * *

 

 

Nero’s been avoiding him. 

Dante is hesitant to call it that, actually—it probably isn’t as big of a deal as his mind makes it seem. In fact, he still sees the kid around on a regular basis, almost as much as he had before. Nero still sits with him at every meal, still follows him to work and back, and still takes blood from him every evening. As far as Dante can see, the kid is, vampiric status aside, perfectly normal and perfectly happy.

Everything is the same, except for the fact that Nero no longer sleeps next to him at night.

Three days ago, the kid had abruptly informed him that he would be returning to sleeping on the couch, effective immediately, leaving a somewhat stunned Dante to mutely nod in agreement.

Since Nero has spent most of his residency at Dante’s apartment crashing on his couch, Dante really shouldn’t be as bothered as he is. But he’s grown awfully used to Nero’s warm presence in his bed in the two weeks or so since Christmas, and going to sleep just isn’t the same without the kid around anymore. 

Dante knows that the best course of action is probably to respect Nero’s privacy. If Nero wants time to himself, wants to spend his nights alone, then Dante should leave things be. Nero is always liable to lash out when pressed too far beyond his comfort zone too quickly, and something tells Dante that having the man he depends on for food and shelter demanding to know why he no longer wants to sleep next to him would be a pretty extreme breach of Nero’s space. 

Still, Dante can’t stop himself from lying awake at night and anxiously trying to guess at what the problem could be for hours on end while Nero sleeps peacefully in the next room over.

At first, he thinks it must have something to do with him--he’s fucked up or said something insensitive or maybe the kid’s found out about what Dante knows and has half-correctly assumed the reason behind Dante withholding such valuable information.

Dante is still certainly being selfish, he can admit that much to himself, but the truth is that he still doesn’t know or believe in his idea of Nero’s death any more than he did a month ago. He’s already finished going through the rest of Vergil’s possessions in this month, but after his brother had thoroughly dismissed the idea of vampiric bonding as a suitable source of power, he had turned his attention away from the concept entirely, and Dante couldn’t find much more relevant information in his journals. 

With his brother out of the picture, the pool of options that Dante has left to try and extract information from is exceedingly limited, and the number is all but reduced to zero when he takes into consideration the fact that he likely can’t share Nero’s predicament with anyone. The kid hadn’t said anything specifically about it, but Dante doesn’t think he’s wrong in assuming that Nero telling him that he literally didn’t know if he wanted to live or not was something that should be kept between the two of them. 

Maybe Dante’s trying too hard to justify himself, especially since Nero’s behavior doesn’t really corroborate the idea that the kid is mad at him. 

More often than not, he catches Nero staring down at his newly acquired necklace with a fond smile on his face, his fingers tracing the silver-plated edges of the amulet, his smile hidden by his scarf. Dante doubts that Nero would be so eager to keep his gift so close to his heart if he were unhappy with Dante, and as prone as Dante is to fucking things up, he likes to think that he’s been doing pretty well for himself lately. 

If the problem isn’t him, though, Dante really isn’t sure what it could be.

He watches Nero carefully during the day, and probably isn’t as unsubtle as he should be, because Nero pauses in the middle of his third bowl of cereal one night and looks up at him with a raised eyebrow. 

“What? Something on my face?” Nero demands, drawing up a spoonful of marshmallows and milk. 

Dante takes a bite of pizza to buy himself time. 

He’s almost absolutely overthinking things at this point, but he can’t help but notice that Nero’s been eating cereal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for about three days now. The kid is definitely addicted to this sugary garbage, but the thing that sets off a prickle of unease in the back of Dante’s mind is the fact that the kid hasn’t tried to cook anything during this entire cereal marathon. 

Ever since Nero actually learned how to operate the stove a couple months ago, he’d taken up the daily art of forcing some sort of vegetable or actual source of nutrition down Dante’s throat, in the sinister disguise of well-cooked meals. Despite Dante’s lifelong anti-nonpizza foods campaign, even he was forced to concede defeat in the face of Nero’s admittedly high quality food and the unfortunately irresistible effect of his wide, pleading eyes.

In short, Nero’s sudden apathy towards either of their diets is unusual, unsettling, and founded completely on what is probably Dante’s mind trying a little too hard to find the cause behind Nero’s change in behavior and twisting simple observations to force them to fit.

“You’ve, uh...been eating a lot of that lately,” Dante decides to cautiously address, because even if what he’s thinking turns out to be absolutely nothing, he has to at least try. He doesn’t have much more to go on other than this, anyway. 

Nero shifts slightly, his face unreadable as he shrugs in a practiced motion, taking in another bite. Everything about the way the kid is acting is seamless, so either nothing is wrong at all, or something is very wrong and Nero is just employing his usual defense mechanisms. Nero’s always been an awful liar, but he’s had two thousand years to learn to act normally, and he certainly knows how to put it to use.

“I just really like this stuff. Anyway, you’re hardly one to talk! Just look at you!”

The deflection is painfully obvious to Dante, who’s spent more than enough time with Nero to have expected this response by now.

“I do plenty of looking at myself, kid, trust me. And it’s always a nice view. Besides, liking pizza is normal. That cereal--not so much. Both you and Verge have awful taste, but I don’t think even he could stand to eat it three meals a day.”

There’s a slight pause at the end of his words, Nero seeming to have caught onto exactly what Dante is so interested in, and he frowns down at the table, reaching down to tug lightly at the necklace beneath his scarf. It’s a nervous habit that he’s acquired since Dante had given the thing to him, and is a pretty good indication to him that Nero is about to try and lie his way out of things.

“It’s just easier this way,” he mutters slowly, his gaze flicking briefly upwards to analyze Dante’s expression, as if checking to see if Dante actually believes him. “Cooking is too much work.”

Dante says nothing in response, continuing to chew at his remaining pizza crust, and watches as Nero struggles with himself for a several seconds afterwards, clearly conflicted about his own lie. The kid’s heart has always been a little too soft, or maybe Nero just particularly wants to be honest with him, because, without any further prompting, Nero sighs out and runs his fingers through his bangs, averting his gaze to the side. 

“Okay, fine. I don’t feel like going near the stove right now. And I’m pretty sick of pizza, so this is kind of the only other thing you have in your place to eat.”

Dante raises an eyebrow as he slowly files this information away, trying to continue to appear casual. He knows that if he visibly pushes too hard or tries to focus too deeply on this one little part, Nero will get embarrassed at the sudden attention and immediately clam up.

“So...it’s not like that the kitchen and I are the best of friends, either. But what it’d do to you? Doesn’t seem like you’d pass up an opportunity to munch on boiled carrots or whatever the rabbit food of the week is.”

Nero makes a face of distaste at him, tugging the sleeves of his hoodie downwards, but doesn’t immediately fire back, which is concerning in of itself, considering how the bunny approach never failed to get a rise out of the kid.

“Nothing,” Nero says automatically, almost out of reflex, but seems to reconsider at the end of the words. “I mean, nothing big.”

In Dante’s opinion, Nero was not a very good judge of what was and wasn’t “big,” probably a side effect from his two thousand years of immortality. To be fair, though, he supposes that he’d be a bit difficult to faze as well, if he spent most of his life as an unkillable vampire. 

“You mind letting me take a look for myself?”

The expression on Nero’s face indicates that he very much would mind, but either Dante has done a spectacularly good job at getting Nero to open up to him, or Nero’s just in a generous mood, because the kid eventually huffs out another breath, before yanking up the edge of his right sleeve. 

There’s a bandage wrapped around his wrist, peeking out from underneath the cloth. It’s not the first time that Nero’s attempted to hide an injury from him, but Dante never fails to feel the familiar twist of guilt in the pit of his stomach every time the boy pops up with a new cut or scrape. 

_ I put that there, _ he thinks helplessly, and it must show on his face, because Nero immediately glares at him, defensive of Dante’s own well-being as always.

“Don’t look at me like that! It’s just a stupid burn. I wasn’t paying attention. Quit looking so pathetic, old man.”

Dante tries to exhale, holding a hand out across the table and laying the back of his hand flat against the surface, glancing up at the kid. Nero chews at his lip for several long minutes, but once he’s convinced that Dante isn’t about to blame himself or wallow in self-guilt, he puts his wrist in the palm of Dante’s extended hand.

He carefully unwraps the bandage and examines the skin underneath. Like Nero had said, it’s not a bad burn--the skin is noticeably red and shiny against the rest of Nero’s pale coloring, but there aren’t any blisters, and the skin hasn’t broken open, much to Dante’s relief.

“Guess you’re right, for once. It really is okay, then,” Dante notes with a crooked smile. “Don’t think you even needed to wrap it up like that, actually.”

Nero doesn’t answer right away, staring down at his exposed wrist with an unusual amount of focus, and Dante isn’t even sure that Nero’s heard him until he suddenly jerks his head back up, his fingers twitching in reflex.

“Well...I just wanted to make sure,” the kid replies in a strangely muted tone. Then, with marginally more confidence, he continues, “Are you done staring at it yet? Your pizza’s getting cold.”

“Sure,” Dante concedes, turning over this new information in his mind as he lets Nero go. 

The boy takes back his wrist and snatches up the bandage again, rewrapping the injury despite Dante’s advice. He visibly winces as he pulls the bandage too tightly around the sensitive skin, but doesn’t pause or backtrack to loosen it, covering it up with a detached sort of determination.

He’d gotten the burn three days ago, which matches up both with how long Nero’s been on his marshmallow marathon for, and with Nero’s self-imposed exile from the bedroom. Dante can’t help but think that these things are maybe somehow related, but, try as he might, he can’t exactly connect getting a kitchen burn with not wanting to sleep near Dante.

Nero goes back to eating his cereal, evidently of the belief that their conversation is over, and Dante doesn’t really know how to continue, as much as he gets the sense that something is still wrong. He isn’t getting the full picture, but he doesn’t even know what kind of picture he’s supposed to be looking at in the first place.

As with most things, though, the pieces start falling into place when things start falling apart.

Over the course of the rest of the week, Nero’s disposition becomes increasingly withdrawn, and Dante can’t help but notice how pale the kid is always starting to look, and how starkly the darkening circles underneath his eyes are starting to stand out because of it. The kid continues to avoid the kitchen, which, given the relatively minor nature of his injury, is highly concerning to Dante. 

He doesn’t dare to bring it up, though, because Nero is becoming both incredibly short-tempered and irritable.

He’s rude enough that Lady and Trish pull Dante aside one night and privately question him about Nero’s condition, which Dante has no answers for. He certain that Nero is acting out for a reason, but he can’t imagine what kind of reason it is--the boy’s always proven himself to be too kind and too patient for his own good. 

Dante, of all people, knows how sharp the kid’s tongue is, but Nero’s endearing brattiness seems to have evolved into an unfamiliar anger. Handling Nero usually feels like sitting by a warm fireplace: cozy and enjoyable for the most part, with occasional uncomfortable flare-ups. But now, Nero feels like an unstable landmine, like if Dante gets too close the kid will blow up in his face and take out his surroundings with him.

Luckily, he’s had enough experience around Nero to understand how to step carefully around him and avoid the inevitable detonation, but this is certainly not true for just about everyone else, a fact that is painfully proven to him when Dante makes the mistake of dragging Nero out to work with him.

It was a stupid move, really, but Dante didn’t want to think about Nero cooped up inside of the apartment all day, alone with nothing but whatever it was that was making him behave so irrationally. So, despite the glare he’d received when he’d asked the kid to come along, he’d brought him along anyway.

Nero sits in the very back row, just as he’d done when he’d first found his way into Dante’s lecture hall, with his arms crossed and his expression well hidden in his scarf. Dante can’t tell exactly what the kid’s looking at, but it’s definitely not at him, which he’s secretly grateful for. Whatever has caught Nero’s attention, it certainly isn’t good--he’s never seen this kind of expression on Nero’s face before, a mixture of intense anger and another emotion he can’t quite identify, and, combined with the unnatural age within Nero’s eyes, the effect is rather unsettling.

The longer he watches Nero out of the corner of his eye, the more convinced he becomes that this was a mistake, an awful sort of dread clawing up in the pit of his stomach. He’s already in the middle of his lecture right now, though--he can’t exactly stop it just to ask Nero what’s wrong, as much as he wants to, so the best he can do is press on and hope that he can take another shot at figuring Nero out afterwards. 

It’s a relief when his own lecture ends, but Nero doesn’t move to come up to him, as he usually does at the end of the hour. Instead, he seems to be actually talking to one of his other students, a boy Dante vaguely recognizes from the roster. It’s one of his older students, a senior about to graduate, taking history for what he thought would be an easy A. 

Dante doesn’t want to intrude on their privacy, but he doesn’t know this other boy very well, and with Nero in such a volatile state, Dante isn’t exactly feeling very reassured about the direction that their conversation could be going in. He tries to inconspicuously pack up his papers as he listens in on their voices, which grow increasingly prominent as the rest of the room empties out.

“Look, man, I’m just  _ saying, _ I don’t think you read this paper right. I think I did pretty good--you sure you graded it right?” The other boy questions, a sort of casual confidence in his tone as he holds up what appears to be his term paper.

It’s one of the ones that he let Nero grade a while back, one that Nero had gleefully savaged due to both its factual inaccuracies and the minimal amount of effort that appeared to have been put into it, and while Dante thought Nero was maybe having a little  _ too  _ much fun with grading the paper, he privately agreed with Nero’s analysis.

Nero definitely recognizes it too, because he clenches his jaw so tightly Dante’s afraid he’ll wear down his teeth.

“I’m sure,” Nero replies, in such an icy tone that the air around them seems to lower by a few degrees.

Dante senses the impending wave of danger, but doesn’t feel like he has a good enough excuse to step in just yet, so he just continues with his movements, helplessly eavesdropping. 

“You think I did a shitty job?”

Nero’s question is so obviously charged with negative energy, and Dante feels so, so  _ wrong  _ about all of this. Nero takes pride in the work that he does for Dante, but he’s always open to the idea that he’s made a mistake or some sort--in fact, this exact type of conversation has occurred in the past, with another student, and Nero was more than happy to sit down with the girl and explain to her why he’d given her the grade he had.

Even though it was pretty obvious that Nero was being insulted now, he’s never known the kid to react to sharp remarks quite like  _ this. _

“Well…” the other boy begins in a lazy drawl, and Dante automatically tenses, unease prickling up his spine and setting his nerves on edge.

“You’re what, nineteen? Surprised the prof lets you grade his papers--don’t you think you should grow up a bit first?” 

There’s a flurry of movement, so fast that Dante has a hard time recognizing what’s happened until he blinks and realizes what he’s looking at. 

Nero’s hand is fisted in the collar of the student shirt, and he’s somehow both gotten out of his own chair while dragging the other out of his, pressing him up against the wall, which is certainly impressive, considering that the other kid has to be twice Nero’s size. He can’t see Nero’s expression from here, but from the flicker of terror that crosses the other student’s face as he suddenly freezes up, Dante doesn’t think he wants to know.

_ “Can you say that again?”  _ Nero asks in a tone so deathly calm and quiet that Dante shivers.

“Tell me again what you fucking think I should do.”

Dante himself is moving up the steps now, creeping closer to Nero and trying to avoid taking him by surprise. The other student doesn’t respond, and Dante has the sickening feeling that isn’t just fear that’s paralyzing him at the moment, not with the way that Nero is staring so directly into his eyes. Despite the lack of further provocation, Dante can see the way that Nero’s left hand clenches into a fist, and he reads the movement easily, closing the gap between him and Nero in a quick motion and grabbing Nero by the arm before he can punch the student.

Nero immediately twists towards him, practically radiating fury as he abruptly lets go of the other student, who rapidly scrambles away as soon as he’s free and flees the scene, leaving the two of them alone, which is probably for the best, because Nero turns all of his attention to fighting against Dante. The kid is wildly difficult to control, despite the advantage that Dante has in size, and he’s frankly surprised that he can keep hold of the boy at all, especially considering how easily Nero had dealt with him when they’d first met.

“Fucking let  _ go  _ of me, old man!” Nero snarls out, thrashing against him, but either Nero’s gotten weaker or Dante’s somehow gotten stronger, because Dante greatly overestimates the amount of resistance that he expects Nero to put up as he accidentally shoves the kid up against the wall.

Dante’s afraid that Nero will hurt himself at this rate, and he’s more afraid of whatever’s making Nero act like this.

“I won’t, Nero--I don’t know what’s gotten into you--”

He barely manages to jerk his head out of the way as Nero’s right fist comes flying at his face, and he reflexively grabs Nero by the wrist and pins it against the wall above the boy’s head. 

“Kid, I just want to talk.”

Nero struggles fruitlessly against him for a moment longer, but Dante somehow manages to keep him held in place, and the boy finally drops his gaze to the ground, glaring at a spot near his shoe and going limp in Dante’s hold. 

Cautiously, Dante lets go of him, and Nero immediately pulls his hands close to his chest, one hand disappearing underneath his scarf and tangling with the chain of the necklace. The motion seems to calm him somewhat, enough so that the kid isn’t literally emanating his anger, and while he doesn’t say anything, he seems willing to follow Dante when he motions for Nero to follow him out the door.

He remains absolutely silent as he trails behind Dante on the path towards his office, and when Dante pushes the door open and herds the kid in, he drops obediently into the chair opposite of Dante’s.

Dante lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding when he shuts the office door behind them and affords them some privacy. As he comes around to collapse into his own chair, he runs a hand through his hair and loosens his necktie, wondering where to even start.

“Nero...what...what’s going on with you?” is all he can finally think to ask, because at this point, he doubts that any approach other than the direct one will suffice. 

He can actually see the way Nero retreats, wrapping his arms around himself and sinking lower into his chair, ducking his head into his scarf in order to hide what Dante knows isn’t a smile.

Dante is painfully reminded of the way the kid had looked at Christmas, the last time that Nero had been able to fully, completely smile at him. Even in all the moments in between, when Nero had been acting and evidently feeling fairly normal, for the most part, he’d never seen Nero look quite as happy as he did then.

And he isn’t sure when he’ll ever get to see it again.

“Nothing,” Nero mumbles out, and Dante feels his own frustration spike sharply upwards.

“Don’t give me that bullshit,” he snaps in response, regretting the sharpness in his tone the instant the words leave his mouth, but he’s just so  _ tired. _ Nothing can ever go right for the two of them, not for long, and especially not when Nero is keeping secrets from him and Dante is sitting right on the biggest secret of them all.

“You haven’t been acting like yourself for a while now. You think all of that’s nothing?”

Nero’s scowl deepens as he brings up his blue glare to meet Dante’s. 

“What, because I eat cereal and sleep on the couch now? Yeah, unless you’re going fucking senile, I don’t think that’s a big deal.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

Nero says nothing in response, and Dante finds himself forced to continue on, because he can’t just keep silent and leave Nero alone, not when the problem has reared its head and appears well-prepared to stay.

If Nero is so insistent on keeping to himself, Dante has no choice but to start with the most obvious problem, then.

“You used your powers on him. The way he couldn’t move at all definitely wasn’t natural--you hypnotized him.”

“Didn’t mean to.”

The admission is curt, but, as far as Dante can tell, completely honest.

“So you’re losing control of your abilities again?”

Something tells him that isn’t quite it--Nero’s already gotten a handle on his awakened vampiric abilities, has had more than enough time to acclimate to them. If Nero hadn’t used his hypnosis intentionally, then something else must have gotten in the way of Nero’s judgment, most likely the strength of his emotions.

“He deserved it, anyway.”

While Dante does think that the other student was being an arrogant and confrontational brat, he definitely didn’t deserve to be magically paralyzed in place by an angry vampire. More than that, though, he absolutely knows that  _ Nero  _ doesn’t think the student deserved it. In fact, he can already see the way that the guilt of his actions settles over him like a shroud, regret and sadness joining the fray with the rest of Nero’s tumultuous feelings.

“Why? I mean, yeah, he was being a piece of shit, but--”

Nero shakes his head, suddenly shoving himself backward and standing up, his fists curled tightly at his sides, trembling all over. He swallows hard before he speaks, keeping his eyes firmly on the floor. Dante feels like Nero is just barely holding himself together, and the kid is moving with the kind of slowness that suggests that he’s afraid he’ll fall apart.

“He told me to grow up,” Nero says in a shaky, hollow sort of tone, his voice breaking off at the end, and Dante forces himself to swallow his extreme concern in favor of pressing onwards.

“Okay, he shouldn’t have said that either. But you don’t normally--”

“I  _ can’t.” _

There’s a horrible rawness in Nero’s voice, and Dante’s heart immediately falls somewhere around his stomach as his own sentence dies in his throat. 

“I  _ know  _ it shouldn’t have bothered me,” Nero continues, his voice barely a whisper. “It’s such a fucking stupid and tiny thing, and he didn’t even know what he was really saying. I shouldn’t have cared, and I don’t understand why I did.”

Dante stands up himself, moving carefully around the side of the desk to stand next to Nero, unsure if he should reach out and touch him, especially with the way he’s holding himself and how out of focus his eyes seem to be.

“You can’t help what you feel, kid. It’s a bit of a sore subject, after all,” he tries reassuringly, his brain scrambling for something to say.

But Nero shakes his head again, looking more lost than Dante’s ever seen him.

“It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make any sense to me and it won’t make any sense to you.” 

Dante frowns, but reaches out slowly, putting his hand on Nero’s shoulder and wrapping his free hand around Nero’s smaller one. The boy looks up at the motion, appearing almost afraid of Dante’s reaction, and Dante tries to keep his tone and face as gentle as possible.

“Then help me make it make sense. Tell me what’s happening, Nero. I can’t guarantee I’ll be all that useful, but I promise that I’m still here for you.”

He hears the hitch in Nero’s breath before the kid pitches forward in a messy sort of hug, his hands curling desperately in the fabric of Dante’s shirt as a strangled sob tears through his body with a shudder. Dante moves them gently backward until he’s pressed up against the wall, and slides downwards until Nero is properly curled against him.

They’re a lot closer now, emotionally speaking, than the last time he’d had to comfort Nero like this, and Dante is grateful for that as he presses a gentle kiss to Nero’s forehead, his fingers brushing soothingly against the kid’s soft hair, reassuring him in the little ways until Nero feels ready to talk.

“You know how I died, right?” Nero asks, after a pause, and Dante tilts his head, not quite having expected the conversation to go in this particular direction.

“Yeah. I saw it, more or less.”

He’s unable to stop himself from tightening the arm that’s around Nero’s waist in a protective sort of manner as the memory of what it’d felt like to die, as Nero, flashes vividly through his mind.

“When I came back, my body was the same as I’d left it. I didn’t have a right arm anymore, and everything was...”

Nero rubs at his right wrist, where Dante suspects that his arm is still wrapped in bandages.

“Well, you know the last thing that happened to me, don’t you?”

Dante does know. He’s never stopped thinking about it, actually, and he doesn’t know how he hadn’t made the connection before as he reaches down and gently pushes up Nero’s sleeve, confirming his theory right.

“So I had to watch all of it heal. And I did, after...after I was alone. I just sort of...sat there and watched it happen. And I didn’t feel anything. I mean, physically, it hurt like hell, but I was literally watching my own skin grow back, and I wasn’t, like... _ afraid _ or upset or anything. There was just nothing.”

He makes an aborted sort of emotion with his right arm, drawing Dante’s attention to the burn on his arm. 

“But then I got this. I couldn’t even stand to look at it. I had to actually  _ cover it up.  _ And I kept having stupid nightmares about it, every night afterward. How does that make any sense? Why is something so tiny like this bothering me  _ now?” _

There’s obvious frustration and confusion in the kid’s tone, but for Dante, things are becoming more clear than ever before. Cautiously, he decides to prod further, wary of the tears still clinging to Nero’s white lashes.

“So you’re saying you didn’t used to feel emotions?” 

Nero bites at his lip, looking unsure of his own answer.

“Not...not in the human sense, I guess. It’s like you know what you’re supposed to feel and when you’re supposed to feel what, but then when it comes to actually feeling something, you just...don’t. It doesn’t work. And it didn’t work, for a really long time, until…”

“Until you met me, huh?” Dante asks even as he already knows the answer, a crooked sort of smile on his face.

He closes his eyes and presses his face into Nero’s hair, holding him closer as he feels Nero numbly nod into his chest. With a gentle hand, he slips underneath the fabric of Nero’s scarf and lays his palm against the left side of Nero’s chest, feeling the nothingness there.

But there could be something there--it’s a small, uncertain chance, but Dante is now finally, absolutely certain that it’s entirely possible. And Dante can’t wait any longer, he can’t let himself let Nero wait any longer. 

“Hey, kid,” he begins, the truth washing over him and bubbling to the surface, right at the tip of his tongue.

“I got something to tell you.”

Nero looks up at him, painfully innocent and small looking, still pressed up against him on the dusty floor of Dante’s office, and listens.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK this chapter officially wins the dubious award of having the MOST rewrites (five HHGGHG)  
> ALSO i feel as if i should say now to pls recheck the tags and that any tag that has not yet been applicable to this fic is applicable now so pls b advised this chapter is a pretty emo one again  
> tY to luna for sitting thru my failed attempts at exposition DUMP

Dante never attended his parents’ funeral.

There weren’t any adults left in their lives who cared enough to try and drag him into the proceedings, and Vergil had taken a single look at him before turning away with a curt nod, respecting Dante’s choice. So while the empty box that didn’t hold his parents’ bodies--because there was nothing left of them to begin with--was lowered into the ground and covered in dirt, Dante had laid on his side and stared at the wall of his increasingly empty home.

The furniture that his parents had owned, all of their possessions, had already been taken away, and the house was already being set up to be sold. He and Vergil were the last things left that needed to go, but everyone involved had decided, out of some sort of “kindness,” that it’d be alright to let the two of them linger a bit longer before properly kicking them into the orphanage.

No one had asked for his reasons for being absent from the ceremony, but he had them anyway.

He hadn’t wanted to go because ever since his parents had died, he and Vergil had been showered with other people’s sympathies left and right, told over and over again how sad it was and how sorry they were that they’d lost their parents.

Dante hated the way they said it like that, because he and Vergil hadn’t lost their parents. They hadn’t done anything, hadn’t even had the  _ chance  _ to do anything, and his parents were gone anyway. 

“Do you blame them?” Vergil had asked quietly upon his return, stripping off his more formal clothes and taking a seat next to Dante on the dusty hardwood floor, in spite of the way he always used to complain about dirtying his clothes.

“No,” Dante had denied automatically, already knowing what Vergil meant before his twin even needed to elaborate. 

He’d denied it, but he’d felt the bitter seed of his anger and loss inside of him anyway, growing like thorny vines in the pit of his stomach. He certainly didn’t want to resent his parents like this, but no matter how much he tried to tell himself that they hadn’t meant to die, the fact still stood that they were dead all the same.

“I do,” Vergil had said, after a pause, much less afraid of being honest with himself than Dante was.

“Do you know why our parents died?” He’d continued, and Dante suddenly wasn’t so sure if he wanted to hear Vergil’s next words at all, but he’d shaken his head anyway, because he’d never been able to resist going down a path that had been opened for him.

“They were too weak. But not me. I’ll be strong.”

Vergil had turned to look at him with that promise still on lips, a steely flash of cold determination entering his eyes, and Dante, for a reason he didn’t yet have the capacity to know, knew for the first time what it was like to be a stranger to his brother.

“You shouldn’t say that,” Dante had put up a weak sort of protest, his first instinct always in defense of his parents, even to his own twin, and it had felt good to feel a flash of righteous anger, something to break up the monotony of grief.

He’d looked properly into his brother’s face, and the careful blankness in his expression, the way his coldness was so delicately arranged around him like a suit of armor sparked a newfound sort of resentment in Dante.

“They died because they were trying to help people. And they didn’t mean to leave us. Not that  _ you  _ care.”

He’d seen the way that pain had flickered so briefly across Vergil’s face before his twin’s expression shuttered and his brother had visibly withdrawn into himself, a tiny crack appearing in their once indestructible bond. Dante had wanted to take the words back as soon as they’d left his mouth, but the damage had already been done, and as far as Dante could see, they were true, anyway.

Vergil hadn’t cried, hadn’t expressed sadness since the day they’d first learned of their parents passing, the tears he’d shed into Dante’s hair being the last and only time, and Dante could hardly understand his brother’s evident apathy.

“I don’t want to care,” Vergil had said slowly, each word coming out as if he were on the edge of falling apart, and in that moment, Dante had found the hurt and betrayal that he had felt in his own heart wrapped around the ends of his brother’s syllables. 

“And you shouldn’t either, Dante.”

Of course, they both know the truth now. 

Vergil  _ had  _ cared, had cared so much he’d given up everything he was just for a misguided attempt at making things right.

And Dante, looking at the top of Nero’s fluffy hair as the boy bends over Vergil’s open journal on the floor, his slender fingers tracing Vergil’s half-written theory of the nature of vampiric death, now understands why his brother had so desperately wished that he didn’t.

“So what do you think?” Dante asks, trying to keep his voice as even as he possibly can, and Nero looks up at the sound of his voice, his eyes still rimmed red with his unshed tears.

“I think your brother is kind of an ass,” Nero answers with a watery laugh, sniffling lightly as he fiddles with the pages of the journal.

“Sure seems like he thought highly of us, huh?”

The kid is clearly referring to Vergil’s notes in the margins, the ones so clinically commenting on the drawbacks of vampiric biology towards his plans. Vergil had dismissed them as a source of power, had deemed them too inconvenient to use as disposable tools, but Nero doesn’t seem too bothered by these words, his attention still mostly on the single, unfinished line in the center of the page.

_ Appear to have once been humans, birthed from a combination of remainders of hatred in the mortal soul and the death of humanity. Perhaps, then, to solve the dilemma of immortality, one requires the reverse _

Dante flicks his eyes upwards, subtly reading the half-formed sentence in his mind again, even though he’s probably memorized every word of it by now, has extracted all the meaning he possibly can from it.

“He  _ is  _ an ass,” Dante agrees absently, scratching lightly at his chin as he tries to swallow back his emotions again. 

“But he’s also right. At least, I think I’ve seen enough by now to believe in it.”

The weak smile on Nero’s lips slowly fades as he reaches his hand upwards, curling his fingers into the fabric of his scarf, keeping his gaze cast firmly onto the center of the page.

“Do you think so? You think I’m matching up to whatever he means by ‘the reverse?’ I’ve never really heard of anything like this, actually. Your brother didn’t even finish his own sentence. So maybe he didn’t even really know, either.”

Despite his attempt at a neutral tone, Nero looks more than a little lost, so Dante shifts himself forwards until he’s sitting on the same side as Nero again, looking down at the same page that the kid is so painstakingly scrutinizing. He doesn’t blame Nero--Vergil’s script always was a little hard to decipher, and Dante’s the one who’s been spending nearly every waking hour of the past month or so deliberating over the meaning of this.

“Well, for one, our purposes are a little different from his, obviously. He was just mostly trying to figure out how to get rid of you guys. Think he called vampires the cockroaches of the demon world, or something like that. No offense to you, of course--the only thing you’ve got in common with them is that you’re both pretty tiny.”

He gets a light smack to the side of his arm for the comment, but the heaviness in Nero’s expression seems to lighten up a bit, and he sniffles lightly underneath his scarf, gazing up at Dante with an almost fond expressions through his lashes. Dante forces himself to look away, to turn his attention back to the book, because if he looks at Nero’s face, he’ll undoubtedly hesitate.

“Anyway, overused metaphors aside--he had a pretty good understanding of how vampires form in the first place. Hatred and vengeance and abandonment of humanity upon death. All that good stuff.”

Nero nods along with the explanation of what he already personally knows, patiently waiting for Dante to continue, and Dante knows that it’s mostly on him--he’s just stalling for time until he gets to the real thing.

“So Verge always was a bit of a romantic. Hard to believe, I know. But I’m pretty sure he thought that the ‘reverse’ of giving up your humanity out of hatred was, well, uh...getting it back out of love, you know?”

It sounds a little ridiculous, coming from his own mouth. He’s never thought of himself as the type to say this sort of cliche shit, but given the rest of the evidence surrounding the situation, it’s the best conclusion he can come up with. Best is a relative term, though, the concept still a little difficult to believe, and from the uncertain look on Nero’s face, the kid doesn’t look entirely like he believes it, either. 

“Around this point in his life, though, Vergil was...not in a place where he could consider something like a demon actually developing the capacity to feel anything at all, really. And if he doesn’t think something will work, he pretty much scraps it entirely and goes onto the next plan.”

“Okay,” Nero says slowly, testing the words in his mouth like he’s still trying to think over things.

“But...I  _ do  _ love you, so…”

The words come out in an embarrassed rush, almost too fast for Dante to make out. The kid quickly ducks his head back into his scarf, pulling it up over his mouth, but the flush on his pale cheeks is still starkly visible, and Dante can’t help the slight chuckle that leaves him, despite the gravity of the situation.

“So according to your brother--and maybe even you--I’m...becoming human? Because of, uh…” Nero makes a vague sort of gesture between the two of them, evidently too flustered to repeat his confession a second time.

“Sort of. Not physically, since you’ve still been drinking my blood without any negative consequences. You also don’t look a day over nineteen, and I really doubt you ever will if this keeps up. But, I mean...you said it yourself, more or less. You told me that you didn’t feel emotions in the ‘human sense.’ But now you do, don’t you?”

That little revelation had been more or less what had finally sold Dante on Vergil’s theory, that instance of Nero proving his humanity more than anything else could.

Nero tilts his head, the confusion on his face shifting to a vague sort of realization, and his eyes shift back to his arm with the bandaged burn, his hand going to tug down the sleeve unconsciously. Dante gets an aborted sort of nod in response, but Nero doesn’t contribute anything further, biting down on his lip.

“Yeah, I know it’s all pretty far-fetched,” Dante starts, and Nero slowly shakes his head.

“No. It makes sense, maybe. I’ve actually been wondering for a really long time about something. About our contract, I mean--I’m not really sure how much you know about how they work. But ours never really seemed like a proper one.”

Most of the knowledge that Dante understands about demon contracting and bonding has come in over these past few months, and mainly from reading over Vergil’s research notes. In the ten years between what his brother had done and around now, he’d never really had the desire to delve into the topic before, preferring to shut it out of his life and pretend that that sort of thing didn’t exist.

“Well, you know me. I’m always breaking the rules.”

Nero laughs a little again, giving him an exasperated sort of look, but it’s easy enough to tell that he’s smiling underneath that scarf again.

“Yeah, you should probably go see someone about that, grandpa. Might become a real problem for your stupid ass. Anyway, the point is--these types of things are supposed to be equal. Each party gives something up the other, and it all balances out the longer you stay contracted for.”

Probably why Vergil had been so eager to dispose of demons once he was done with them--his brother would absolutely despise the idea of giving anything up to the same kind of creatures that had murdered their parents. 

“So...you’ve gotten stuff from me. And don’t you dare feel bad about it again! It’s all still totally out of my own will,” Nero hurries to defend Dante before the thought can even enter his mind, as protective of his well-being as usual.

“But I never really knew what I was getting from you. Other than your blood, I mean. I guess I know now.”

In Dante’s opinion, it doesn’t sound very balanced to him. Nero’s given him superhuman healing, above average reflexes and strength, and has pretty much done his absolute best to fix up his life. Dante’s given Nero a fuckton of traumatic emotions and a way to die. 

Not very generous of him, in his opinion.

“Seems like you got the short end of the stick. Sorry about that, kid,” Dante chuckles lightly, a pause dipping in between the end of his sentence as he reminds himself that there’s still more to be said. He feels his heartbeat picking up, pounding painfully against the bones of his chest, his throat tightening as he forces himself to go on.

“Any ideas on what you’re gonna do with it?”

As casual as he tries to make himself sound, the plain and simple truth is that he  _ cares.  _ He cares about what the answer will be, because in one path, he’ll live out a decent life with Nero until he inevitably dies and Nero is alone again, and in the other, Dante won’t be so lucky.

“What do you mean?”

Nero averts his eyes, fidgeting in place, and when he speaks, Dante recognizes that Nero is just like him, trying to stall for time to avoid what they’ll both inevitably have to face.

Dante exhales slowly, leaning into Nero and trying to make eye contact with the boy again, even as he knows that seeing Nero’s innocent, doe-eyed look will only make things harder on himself.

“I mean...you don’t heal from fatal injuries anymore. And...what is essentially your soul, more or less, is more human than demon now. When or if you die, your body won’t be able to save you from it, and there won’t be anything waiting for you this time ready to turn you into a demon. You’ll die, and that’ll be it.”

Actually, he’s not so sure of that, either. Or rather, there’s a part of him that hopes that there’s room for doubt. He’s still playing with the thought from earlier in his mind, the vague little wish that maybe since Nero, as a human, had been able to choose to become a demon, then the kid might be able to work things the opposite way, as well.

But after so many years on this Earth, Dante’s not entirely certain that Nero will choose to come back at all. The whole thing is just a possibility, anyway, and Dante doesn’t want to pressure the kid into thinking that he has to come back. What Nero does with his afterlife should be up to him, and no one else.

So he won’t tell Nero this little part, this possibly non-existent caveat that Dante is secretly putting so much of his hope on, if only because of how unfair it would be to the kid.

“That’ll be it,” Nero echoes softly, staring hard at the wooden floorboards of Dante’s office.

“That’s...what I wanted, isn’t it?” 

There’s very little conviction in Nero’s voice, most of it overshadowed by doubt and what could possibly be fear, a deep-rooted hesitation in himself. Even with the option of a peaceful death open to him, Nero still doesn’t seem like he’s entirely sure of what he wants to do, no matter how much he’s probably thought over this in the time they’ve spent together.

_ I don’t want to die, _ Nero had told him, in a different time, his eyes clouded with fever and pain _.  _

_ But I don’t want to live like this, either. _

“I can’t tell you that. The whole thing is your choice, after all,” he’s fighting with himself now, honestly, making his best effort to keep things neutral and leave his own opinion out of things.

Nero seems to shrink in on himself though, the hand underneath his scarf grasping at the amulet at his neck and when he looks up Dante through his long, snowy lashes, Dante remembers pressing his forehead against Nero’s own feverish one and seeing the same open and honest vulnerability he finds now. 

“And...what if I don’t want it to be my choice? What if…”

Something like guilt enters Nero’s gaze as he stares hard at Dante, his sentence trailing off into nothing, and that single moment is all Dante needs to understand what Nero is truly asking of him. He thinks he should maybe feel more hesitant about this, but it’s surprisingly easy to reach up and cup the back of Nero’s head, pressing a gentle kiss to the boy’s head. 

“Then I’ve got you. I’ll take care of it, Nero.”

Nero watches him warily, apparently unsure as to whether or not Dante has understood his full meaning.

But Dante knows it well.

At this point, the largest deciding factor in whether or not Nero truly wants to pass on is Dante’s own existence. The kid is clearly concerned about leaving him behind, and, coupled with his initial hesitation to waste what Nero perceived as his two friends’ sacrifices for him, the fact makes a decision on his part all but impossible. 

And if Nero is unable to choose for himself, then there’s really only one other person who can do it for him.

“Maybe it’s unfair to you…” Nero starts uncertainly, a fair amount of measured caution in his gaze, and Dante chuckles lightly before properly pulling the kid to his chest in a hug.

“Don’t worry about me, kid.”

He doesn’t have to say anything more to cause Nero to relax against him, his muscles losing their tension as the boy goes limp in his hold with relief clear in his motions, and Dante spends a long time staring down at Nero’s white, fluffy locks in silence.

In all honesty, now that the choice has been left up to him, it’s really not as hard of a decision as it really should be.

Nero would stay if Dante asked him to, that much is abundantly clear. After everything they’ve been through, the boy is so deeply, unquestionably in love with him that he would easily pass up this chance at finally getting to put two thousand years of a far too-long life to an end. 

The boy is selfless and loyal to a fault, far too capable of putting himself aside for the sake of someone else.

So in the end, it really comes down to Dante.

Even though Nero is happy enough now, he’ll never quite be able to forget the way he died or the guilt of his friends’ deaths or the centuries of loneliness he’d had to endure. And he’ll have to wake up and face every day with all that same knowledge.

Nero doesn’t deserve that.

This is the kid who turned himself into a demonic entity underneath the sole intent of saving his two friends, who chose to rescue a complete stranger on the streets without expecting anything in return, who entered Dante’s life and forced him to get his shit together, who was still willing to fall in love with him, despite seeing all of the very worst parts of his life.

And Dante, quite unquestionably, loves him back.

Nero sighs out against him, shifting his head upwards to meet Dante’s eyes, and Dante thinks the boy might already see the answer on his face, because he gives him a tiny, infinitely grateful smile before he rests his head properly against Dante’s chest. His face tucks into his scarf with the motion, and the gesture is comfortingly familiar.

Dante reaches up and tucks a strand of Nero’s soft white hair behind his ear, and promises that he’ll remember this.

He’ll remember the trusting look in Nero’s eyes, the way that he hides his smiles in Dante’s scarf, how he so shyly peeks up at him through his bangs when he has something particularly important to say to him. He’ll remember what Nero looks like when he first wakes up, his hair impossibly messy and Dante’s shirt sliding off of his shoulders, and he’ll remember the way that Nero goes to sleep, how cuddly he gets when he’s tired past the point of exhaustion, the way he nestles into Dante and fits so perfectly into the curve of his body.

He’ll remember all the parts about Nero, the best parts and the saddest parts and even all the little things that the kid does to annoy Dante, and he’ll keep them with him.

But he won’t keep Nero.

The people in Dante’s life are always leaving him--or maybe he’s always losing them--but this time, Dante thinks that he just might be okay with letting this one go.

“Thank you, Nero,” he finally murmurs, and it’s all the answer that Nero needs. 

Nero’s little smile widens, his eyes soft and full of unspoken affection.

“Don’t worry about it.”

 

* * *

 

They have one last good day, some time after things have been decided.

Dante’s not entirely sure how they manage to work things out. After that conversation in his office, he and Nero had walked out and went on about their normal business, a comfortable, easy sort of agreement between them. They didn’t talk about it, and they continue not to talk about it in the days that pass--there just isn’t a need to.

He thinks that maybe months ago, he would have been filled with a disquieting sort of panic, would have started pushing Nero away the moment he was certain that Nero was soon going to be gone, but instead, Dante only feels an all-encompassing sort of calm. He’ll enjoy what time he has left with Nero, and appreciate it in the moments where the kid is gone.

So when Nero wakes up one morning, curled up against his chest, his eyes opening just a little slower than normal, and tilts his head up, his smile tinged by sadness, Dante merely drops his hand in the kid’s fluffy hair and brings him closer.

“Seems like a nice day,” Nero murmurs sleepily, his eyes tired but sharp with meaning, and Dante chuckles softly, reaching over Nero for where his phone is laying on the bedside table. 

He lays comfortably for a moment, keeping Nero wrapped up in one arm and idly scrolling through his notifications with the other. He’s got the usual texts from Lady and Trish in their group chat, talking about some misadventure or another, and more than a few desperate emails from his students, begging for extra-credit or extracurricular help. 

“I see your students haven’t gotten any less stupid,” Nero grumbles from where he’s twisted around to peer at Dante’s emails, his eyes narrowing as he recognizes a particularly annoying name at the bottom of the message. 

“God, I hate that one. He’s always misspelling your name on his assignments. How do you even think that ‘Dante’ has a ‘y’ and not an ‘e’ at the end of it?”

Dante smiles at Nero’s usual vitriol, running his fingers gently against the curve of Nero’s hip, feeling the boy shift underneath his fingers.

“Well, hey, you gotta give him credit for getting creative. He’s definitely got a unique sort of mind. Might have to repeat another year of college, though. But I don’t think he’s gonna be taking history next year, at least.”

“He’d better not. You’re gonna have an assload of spelling errors to correct if he does.”

“Good to see you’re so concerned for my future.”

He laughs as Nero flushes and drags the blankets upwards over his face to hide his blush, and properly opens up his list of contacts, making a proper call to the school. He won’t be able to come in today, all things considered, and he doesn’t need that particular loose end interrupting things.

Dante fires off a quick apology, then makes up some bullshit story about a deathly ill grandma who seriously needed his immediate attention. He’s been tenured for a while, and has done pretty good work his entire career, so even with all the days he’s missed since Nero had come into his life, the school lets him off fairly easy.

“Yes, it’s very tragic indeed. Grandma Mildred’s really on her last legs, and I just couldn’t bear to put her into the nursing home, you know?”

Nero lets out a muffled snort into the blankets as he tries not to blow Dante’s cover, and Dante ruffles his hair idly, listening to the administrator on the other end of the phone ramble on about how many paid days of leave he had left.

“Poor old grandma, huh? Hate to see how old she must be if  _ you’re _ her grandson,” Nero remarks as he squirms out of Dante’s grasp and properly sits up, stretching himself out with a yawn. 

The hem of the borrowed shirt that the boy’s wearing rides slightly upwards with the motion, and Dante can’t help but raise a brow, propping himself up on one arm with muted interest as he flicks his eyes over Nero’s form. He isn’t planning on getting too excited--he just wants to memorize the way Nero looks in this moment, with the sunlight filtering in through the curtains and glowing softly against the boy’s pale skin and hair. 

Nero ducks his head when he notices Dante’s staring, and Dante soon finds himself confronted with a faceful of pillow, the soft fluff smacking lightly against his cheek. He removes it easily and hugs it close to his chest, grinning lazily up at Nero, who busies himself with tugging the end of the shirt downwards.

“Anyone ever teach you to respect the elderly, kid?” 

“Yeah, Grandma Mildred did. She also told me to stay away from perverted dumbasses, yet here we are.”

The kid slips properly out of bed, his movements still a little stiff, the slight unevenness in his steps noticeable to a practiced eye, and Dante tries not to feel too smug at that particular detail. Nero doesn’t bother to change out of his shirt, going straight to the kitchen, and Dante can hear the faint sounds of Nero climbing up on top of the counter to get to the higher cabinets, probably in search of his favorite cereal bowl.

Dante doesn’t follow him right away, rolling to the side and staring for a long moment at the nightstand next to his bed. He hasn’t locked the top drawer in a long time, hasn’t felt a need to keep his own things away from himself anymore. 

He’s become a different person from the Dante who needed to do those things, and he knows that when he wakes up tomorrow to a much emptier bed and home, he won’t be quite the same as he is today, either. 

But maybe that’s not such a bad thing. He’s always been in the habit of taking things one day at a time, anyway, so there was little use in trying to look into an uncertain future. 

He rolls properly out of bed when he thinks he’s kept Nero waiting long enough, wincing when the stiff muscles in his back audibly crack when he stretches them. Good thing the kid wasn’t around to hear that--Dante would probably never live down the vindictive glee that the boy was sure to feel.

Nero is sitting in one of the kitchen chairs when he finally strolls into the room in only the sweatpants he’d worn to bed. The kid is as unmoving as a statue, his arms crossed and an unfortunately adorable almost-pout on his face.

“Oh, I know that look,” Dante starts before Nero can attempt to unsubtly hint at what’s actually wrong.

A quick glance around the room reveals the nature of the tragedy, anyway. The kitchen table looks oddly barren, with an empty bowl and a clean spoon resting in one corner and the jug of milk off to the side, the presence of one rainbow-colored cereal box woefully unaccounted for.

“So when was the last time we restocked on the cereal again? Last week? No, actually...I seem to recall picking up two boxes about four days ago.”

Nero’s cheeks dust with pale pink at the unwelcome reminder of exactly how much of this sugary cereal garbage he’s been eating as he runs his fingers through his still sleep-tousled hair, looking up at Dante with a mixture of embarrassment and supplication.

“Do I question  _ your  _ food choices?” Nero demands, trying to hide the wince on his face as he shifts unevenly in the chair underneath him. Maybe Dante should invest in a throw pillow for Nero to sit on everywhere. Or just get comfier chairs overall.

They both know the answer to Nero’s question, so Dante merely shrugs, already starting to go back into the bedroom in search of a fresh change of clothes. 

Nero hasn’t done the laundry in a few days, but Dante manages to dig around in the pile in his corner and procure an appropriate looking set of casual clothes, snagging an extra, smaller-sized set for Nero and throwing it to the kid on his way out.

The boy makes a noise of protest, peeking up at Dante over the bundle of fabric in his arms, clearly unhappy with the prospect of having to walk and follow Dante to the store. Dante stands his ground, though.

“There’s like, eight different flavors of this stuff. You’re coming with me, kid. Last time I bought the ‘lemon’ flavor instead of the vanilla, and I thought you were about to cry your pretty eyes out when you saw it.”

“It’s not the same!” Nero snaps in defense of his cereal, unusually passionate about a rainbow box of sugar and carbohydrates.

“You can’t just have lemon in the mornings like that! You need to start vanilla, then move upwards.”

Dante isn’t so sure that he’s ready to hear another cereal seminar, so he decides to easily silence Nero before he can begin by stripping out of his sweatpants with a casual sort of ease, delighting in the alarmed squawk of embarrassment he’s rewarded with.

“Yeah, I’ll be sure to keep all that in mind for next time. Hurry up, kid. There’s a breakfast slice of pizza with my name on it, waiting for when we get back.”

Nero makes a face at him, but obediently pulls on the pants anyway, evidently deciding that Dante’s shirt on him covers enough for their purposes. 

They split up when they get to the entrance of the grocery store, with Nero making an immediate beeline for the breakfast food aisle, while Dante takes a considerably less hurried amount of time to wander back over to the pharmacy section. He hasn’t been here in a while, except to buy extra bandaids for Nero’s little cuts and scrapes, and Dante himself will probably never need anything in this area ever again, thanks to Nero’s gift to him.

He really only needs one quick thing, though, so it’s not too much of a surprise to him that Nero is still standing in the middle of the aisle by the time Dante finishes up his own business, holding up two vaguely differently colored boxes and looking between them with a small amount of distress.

“So what’s the holdup this time?” Dante dares to inquire, leaning over Nero’s shoulder and trying to read the horrendous, blobby font that the graphic designer from Hell had decided to use on the damn things.

“This one’s Vanilla,” Nero starts uncertainly, giving the box in his left hand a slight shake. “But this one is  _ French  _ Vanilla.”

As far as Dante can tell, the two products are exactly the same, except that French Vanilla seems to have at least twice the amount of sugar in a single serving than its more traditional counterpart. 

For both of their sakes, Dante wordlessly snatches the French Vanilla out of Nero’s grasp and relocates it to the highest shelf in the aisle, which Nero absolutely cannot reach, earning himself a healthy glare from the kid.

“Remember the pizza,” Dante reminds him, placing a hand on Nero’s back and steering him towards the cash register, herding him along with some amount of protest.

Twenty-five minutes later, Dante gets his pizza, and Nero is crunching voraciously through at least a fourth of the box, his temporary withdrawal appearing to have rebounded on him.

“So what’s the plan for today?” Nero mumbles around a mouthful of marshmallows and puffed wheat as Dante concentrates on pulling the leftover olives off of his slice of pizza.

Dante tries to contemplate for a minute on what the two of them should actually do, if there’s any last thing that he thinks Nero might want to see or experience, but that sort of question seems to stray further into Nero’s own personal territory. 

“Not really a good planner myself, so I’m leaving that one up to you.”

Nero swirls his sky-colored milk idly in his bowl, gazing idly down into the liquid.

“I don’t know. I think...I think I just want a normal day. Nothing really has to happen, I mean. Just...us two. Doing normal shit.”

The kid looks up then, blinking softly at Dante through his lashes, and Dante shrugs around the mouthful of pizza, trying to make himself as coherent as possible as he speaks.

“Yeah, I can get behind that.” 

So they have a normal day, as per Nero’s request.

Nero seems particularly intent on cleaning the apartment up, evidently worried about its state of affairs once it’ll be left solely in Dante’s hands. Dante would try to help, but Nero insists that he only makes things worse--which is probably true, considering how Dante himself has a such a specific order to his messes. He can always find the TV remote underneath the fifth sock in his dirty laundry pile, and if any of his possessions go missing, he can usually find them within one or two pizza boxes worth of searching.

Dante himself has quite a lot of paperwork to catch up on, anyway.

Soon enough, he’ll lose one-half of his current grading force, and will be forced to resort to late night coffee runs to slog through all of the essays and long-answer free response questions on his exams, so he figures that it’s probably better if he gets an advantage early on.

Sometime in the late afternoon, Nero holes himself up in their bedroom, with specific instructions for Dante to leave him undisturbed, and Dante takes it in stride, pulling out his phone to order a fresh pizza. Lady and Trish ask if they’re free to drop by later in the night, and he’s forced to decline their request in a rare display of dissent, promising to make it up to them sometime in the indefinite future. 

He isn’t too sure about an exact date--time feels pretty strange for him today. It’s getting awfully close to evening, and he’s spent almost the entirety of his day doing essentially nothing aside from shopping for cereal and marking up his students’ papers with a pen.

He knows that it’s about time he started getting prepared, though.

Nero comes out of the bedroom just as Dante is extracting his purchase from earlier in the day from the plastic shopping bag, dropping the bottle of sleeping pills onto the surface of the table.

“Those better not ever be for you,” Nero mutters as he pokes at the bottle, eyeing the familiar label and all of the memories that come along with it. 

Dante puts his hands up defensively, an easy smirk stretching across his face.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Nero spends an impossibly long moment standing there and staring at him, evidently trying to figure out whether Dante’s little joke was actually meant to be funny or not, before being apparently unable to come to a conclusion.

“You’re so stupid,” Nero informs him, circling around the other side of the table and dropping into his lap, his thin fingers tracing the strong curve of Dante’s jaw, the tips of his skin brushing against the stubble lining his face.

Dante automatically brings his hands to Nero’s waist to stabilize him, then shuts his eyes for a brief moment and tries to remember the feeling of this. It’s a hopeless endeavor, as the warm tickle of Nero’s touch starts to fade as soon as his hands leave a particular spot. With his eyes closed, he feels, rather than sees the way that Nero leans into him, pressing a shy, chaste kiss against his lips.

He feels a quiet, subdued sort of sadness settle over the both of them with the motion, as if the whole day leading up to this has been one long sort of daydream, and only now are they really getting into the truth of things. 

“I, um...I’ve been thinking,” Nero starts once he pulls away, keeping his hands draped lightly against Dante’s chest and shoulders. 

“I didn’t know whether to mention this to you or not, because I didn’t want to get your hopes up and all that.”

Dante tilts his head back, trying to get a better glimpse at the look on Nero’s face, and already feels as if he knows what Nero might say, but he lets the boy continue anyway.

“I’m really choosing to believe in you and your brother here, even though I’ve never met him. Which is probably stupid and pretty irrational, but it’s happening anyway. But...if everything about this theory is true, then I think it might end up sort of like last time. Not in the bad, demon-turning way, but in the getting-to-choose way. Between really dying and...getting to be a human, I mean.”

He’s not surprised that Nero’s figured it out on his own. Nero’s always been a smart kid, more so than he’s ever given himself credit for, and he has the advantage of having the opposite personal experience on his side. 

“Oh, really?”

Dante tries to look as if this revelation is new to him, but probably doesn’t do a very convincing job, because Nero gives him a dry sort of look, reaching up to lightly smack the back of his head.

“Sorry,” he amends, before bringing his hands to cup Nero’s cheek, his thumb tracing the soft lines of Nero’s mouth.

“I thought about that too, but we really don’t know that for sure. Besides...whatever happens at that point, I’d prefer it to be up to you, for whatever is better for you.”

Nero gently bites at his own lip, turning his gaze to somewhere over Dante’s shoulder.

“I think I’d want to come back. But I don’t think it’ll be the same. I mean, it’s probably a lot harder the other way around. Two thousand years of memory don’t really fit well into a human brain--I mean, you saw firsthand how well that worked out for you back then.”

Dante recalls the experience, the agonizing feeling of having everything that Nero’s lived through dumped into his mind all at once. Despite having seen more or less all of it, he honestly can’t remember the specifics of anything, couldn’t even give a vague, general description of any of them. 

“So you probably won’t remember me. Or any of this. Nothing of your first human life, either. Although I’d say that that part is maybe a good thing,” Dante swallows hard, feeling the first stings of pain in his chest, a creeping cold starting to settle directly into his heart.

Nero seems to tremble for a moment before giving a slow nod of agreement, and Dante breathes out, ignoring the part of him that had been privately hoping to be wrong. After all, a human Nero with no memories was probably the best outcome, if it was even a possibility at all.

“Either way, I think you deserve it. And what you do with that new life is pretty much up to you, but…”

He presses his thumb a little harder against the soft skin of Nero’s face, offering the kid a gentle smile.

“If you happen to run into me again, you’ll definitely have a place here.”

Nero’s eyes are starting to look suspiciously shiny, and the kid blinks hard at him, his body shivering slightly underneath Dante’s touch.

“What if I’m different?” Nero asks softly, his voice whisper-soft, carried over only because of their proximity.

“Without my memories, it’ll be like I never did any of that stuff with you. So...will you still…”

Dante can’t help but laugh, not because it’s a particularly funny situation, but because the answer to Nero’s unspoken question is the easiest one to come by. There’s a choked sort of sadness bleeding into his tone as he moves his hand from Nero’s face to the back of the kid’s head, pressing his face into the crook of his own neck.

“Kid,” he starts, tilting his head upwards towards the ceiling, his voice incredibly steady despite the stinging at his blurred eyes.

He runs his fingers gently against Nero’s hair, thinking of lazy cuddles and stolen kisses and rainbow-colored cereal boxes, but mostly of this single, normal day that had been good just because Nero was in it.

He could maybe have a countless number of days like this, in some distant, happier part of his future. Or maybe he’ll never have one again.

Whichever way it goes, it hardly changes the truth.

“I think it’d be harder to  _ not  _ fall in love with you.”

Nero inhales sharply, his breath hitching in a painful sounding hiccup as he spasms against Dante’s body, his fingers curling harshly into the fabric of Dante’s clothing, and Dante feels the warm wetness of the kid’s tears leaking into the collar of his shirt.

“So if I get lucky enough to find you twice in this life, you can sure as hell bet that I’m gonna take care of you.”

Dante lets his promise hang in the air, covering the both of them like a shroud, and Nero lets out a strangled sob, nodding frantically against him, even as he keeps his head down.

“Okay,” Nero whispers, another promise on top of Dante’s own, and Dante feels the boy’s hand on his chest, shifting slowly to the left side of his body, his palm pressed against the fluttering rhythm of Dante’s heart. 

He stays like that for a long moment, evidently just wanting to feel more of Dante, and Dante tries to breathe normally, blinking away the tears pricking at his own vision so that he can properly look at the boy when Nero seems to recover.

The kid’s eyes are red, and there’s still a tear clinging to the edge of his lashes, but he offers Dante a weak smile, before reaching into one of his pockets and producing what looks like a neatly folded envelope. 

There’s his name on it, on the back, written in Nero’s compact hand, the traces of pen still slightly smudged on the white paper, and the ink looks to be only a few hours old.

“I know you got a real shitty track record with letters,” Nero sniffles, pausing to swipe briefly at his eyes.

“But I’m trusting you with this anyway.”

Nero presses it into his hand, and Dante implicitly understands that he’ll probably need this in a few more hours, once Nero is gone. He tucks it away into the folds of his own coat, matching Nero’s watery smile with a crooked one of his own.

He isn’t sure what Nero has to say to him, what he still wants to say to him after he’s gone, but he’ll treasure every word of it, anyway.

“Yeah. You got it, kid.”

The boy seems reassured now that he’s safely delivered what is more or less his parting message to Dante, and Dante feels the weight in his stomach starting to solidify into a firm sort of resolve. He tilts Nero’s head up, looking him in the eyes, trying again and again to commit the exact shade of baby blue to memory.

“You ready?”

Nero wipes at his eyes again, then seems to look back at Dante with unusual focus, and it occurs to Dante that Nero is quite possibly doing the same thing, trying to keep Dante’s image closest to him when he needs it the most.

Then he mutely nods, and Dante shifts with the kid in his lap, making room so he can reach over and shake out two of the sleeping tablets and offer them up to Nero. The boy doesn’t know the exact details of what happens after this stage, and his only experience thus far with this kind of thing has been entirely negative, but he takes them from Dante without hesitation, letting them dissolve in his mouth.

Dante watches him swallow them down, trying not to focus on the twinge of pain that the sight of the grimace on Nero’s soft, cute face makes him feel. Then Dante gently rearranges their positions, shifting them so his arms are underneath Nero’s upper back and his knees, and carries him properly to bed.

The kid is pretty small, and the sleeping pills themselves are pretty strong, so it only takes Nero about fifteen minutes before his eyes are starting to lose focus, his lids fluttering uncontrollably shut. He reaches out a weak hand, and Dante, kneeling at the side of the bed, takes it in his own.

The contact seems to stir Nero just a little, and the boy blinks slowly at him for a long moment before the kindest, freest smile he’s ever seen on Nero’s face gently curves at his mouth.

“Be good to yourself, Dante,” Nero tells him, his words slightly slurred by sleep.

Nero’s eyes properly slip shut, and his breathing evens out into a deeper rhythm, his grip on Dante’s hand going gently limp.

Dante reaches over, brushing Nero’s bangs away from his face and studying the peaceful, relaxed set of his expression. He thinks he always wants to see Nero like this, and maybe he will, if things work out the way they both want them to.

Even if they don’t, it’s alright.

Nero has given him enough, has given him the world and more.

He’s done everything that he could with Nero, has had all the chances he needs with the boy, and even when Nero is gone, Dante will at least know that he’d never  _ lost  _ Nero.

But maybe he’ll still get to find him again.

Dante opens the top drawer in his nightstand, looking down at all the letters next to Lady’s gun. He’s still never used it, there are six bullets in the chamber, and he’ll only ever need one.

_ Eight-year-old Dante is looking into the box, looking at the gun with silver bullets left inside-- _

He takes his newest letter from his coat pocket, laying it gently on top of the stack, the only unopened letter among them, and swaps it out for the gun. 

There won’t be a body. He’s observed enough of demonic behavior after death to be familiar with the way they die, their remains disappearing into smoke.

_ and the man says that that’s the only thing their parents left behind, the rest of the bodies were gone, vanished into nonexistence-- _

He leans over Nero again, the glint of the chain of the boy’s Christmas present shining softly in the moonlight. Nero won’t be able to take it with him, will leave his brother’s amulet behind, once again without an owner.

_ Two necklaces, each with half of the pendant. Vergil takes one and he takes one-- _

So there won’t be anything truly of the boy left, only things that Dante has given to him, the things that Dante will remember him by.

_ and Vergil presses his half against Dante’s and tells him that they’ll be together forever, that he won’t let them be split apart. _

“I had a good day with you today, kid.”

But it’s alright.

“Take care, Nero.”

Dante presses a hand against Nero’s chest, feeling the nothingness against his hand, gently touches the tip of the gun to Nero’s temple, and sets him free.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok dante was too depressed for me to work on any of my other projects so this chapter comes early  
> the next chapter shall b ....THE EPILOGUE.........we hav come a long way

Dante doesn’t feel much of anything, at first.

Nero’s body is unmoving and cold on the bed, tendrils of smoke curling lightly off of his sides. It’s already starting to dissolve itself, to erase the final proof of Nero’s existence altogether, and Dante stays where he is and merely watches it happen, a cold sort of emptiness hollowing itself out inside of him. 

It’s not a slow process, and it takes maybe two, three minutes before Nero is finally completely gone, his two thousand years of life so easily swept away. 

Dante tucks the gun back away into his drawer, his movements as slow and careful as he can make them, before he reaches for the pile of clothes left on the bed, methodically folding each part up. There isn’t much of it to clean up—Nero was really only wearing his shirt and the pants Dante had thrown at him before their last shopping trip, and it vaguely occurs to Dante that he maybe should have put Nero’s beloved scarf on him before ending things.

It doesn’t matter, anyway. Nero won’t be cold anymore, not where he’s going.

He stacks the fabric on top of each other, then places it neatly on top of his dresser. He isn’t too sure what he’s going to do with them anymore, honestly—he won’t wear them himself, that’s for sure, but he’d rather not give them away or destroy them. 

Dante feels vaguely like he’s lost in some sort of dream, far removed from his own surroundings, watching himself as he bends down over the bed again and picks up the amulet in his hands, his fingers rubbing gently at the pendant. Absently, he reaches for his own half of the amulet and places the two parts in the drawer together, closing the whole thing with a soft click. 

They were always meant to stay together, after all.

Nero’s letter to him is still inside the drawer, lying innocuously underneath the gun and the pendant, but Dante doesn’t think he can read it now, too unmoored from his own brain to even understand the contents. 

Then, with his room properly emptied of Nero’s presence, Dante lays back on his bed and underneath the covers and closes his eyes. He thinks he can still feel Nero’s warmth on from where the boy had been laying on top of his sheets, but it fades quickly, replaced by Dante’s own. 

Dante rolls onto his side, taking the covers with him, and turns his face slightly into Nero’s pillow, trying to catch the last of Nero’s scent, but Nero has spent so much of his last remaining months intertwined with Dante that he can barely tell them apart. Nero smells like Dante’s strawberry shampoo, like his detergent on his borrowed clothes, like his house and his bed and his sheets. 

In fact, the only distinction is the faint, barely-there sweetness of vanilla and marshmallows. It’s not much, but it’s all Dante has, so he nestles himself further in, and sleeps.

He doesn’t dream, much to his surprise. He thought he’d see Nero, maybe, would see himself making the opposite choice, the one where Nero would remain forever next to him and forever young, but there just isn’t anything at all. 

Perhaps it’s for the best, though, because when he wakes up to an empty bed and listens to the silence from the empty kitchen, he doesn’t feel like he’s missing anything. He sits up from bed and combs his hair down and goes throughout his day as best as he can, grabbing his bag and tucking his phone inside and disappearing off to work without breakfast. 

His students whisper amongst each other when they file into the lecture hall, an anxious murmur rippling over them. Dante sees the way their gazes flicker between him and the empty row of seats that Nero usually occupies, and for a moment, when Dante blinks, he thinks he can see the way that Nero used to stretch himself across them, lounging around like Dante’s class was the most boring thing he’d ever been put through. 

Dante pretends he can hear the scratch of Nero’s pencil on paper, his muffled cursing as the side of his left hand would trail along the paper as he wrote, his eyes flashing with an eagerness to present his fresh list of criticisms to Dante after each lecture, just to emphasize how much he hated Dante’s class.

But he’d still come with Dante every day, anyway. 

Dante blinks again, and the image, or rather, the memory, is gone. He straightens himself up, reaching inside of the part of him that still feels absolutely nothing, and tries to conjure up some of his usual self, a regular, casual smile settling itself over his face. 

He must do a good job of it, because his students’ vaguely worried and mostly confused looks fade away, reassured by Dante’s pretense as they reach for their notebooks and prepare to take notes on the day’s lecture. Dante already knows this material by heart, has been teaching it on routine for years now, so it’s easy enough to allow himself to drift away as his memory takes over, guiding him through the motions of delivering this information.

It’s impossible to completely focus on teaching, anyway, because Nero’s presence is everywhere in this room. Most of his students are around Nero’s age, give or take a few years, and as Dante’s gaze passes over their faces, he realizes that he could search the crowd for a lifetime and never find Nero’s shade of blue in any of their eyes. 

He might never see it again, and it’ll be entirely his fault.

“Ending early for today,” he dismisses his class, once he can’t take being in this room anymore, because even though nearly all the seats are filled and it’s packed to the brim with noise and activity, Dante has never felt it to be emptier. 

He barricades himself in his office again, holing himself up and hiding from where Nero lurks at the edge of every thought, but it isn’t safe here, either. 

The chair across from him is where Nero used to sit at his desk and help grade his papers, frowning down at the words beneath him and chewing thoughtfully at the end of Dante’s shitty cheap pens, and file cabinet is where Nero used to go through his things and point out how lazy and disorganized he was, and the floor is where they’d sat when Dante had decided that Nero was going to--

Dante deliberately takes himself away from that train of thought, perhaps not as well-adapted to everything that’s happened as he tries to make himself be, and instead reaches for another pen, absently starting to look over some of his spare paperwork. 

Staring at the tiny font printed on the page makes his vision blur and his head spin, but it also absorbs his attention for a good chunk of time, and lets him lose himself in another, more pleasant reality where he doesn’t have to think. 

He manages to stay that way, for a time, until he comes back to his apartment and Trish and Lady are sitting on his couch, chattering away obliviously. From the looks of it, they don’t know what happened, which makes a fair amount of sense, considering how little Dante had shared about Nero’s predicament with them. The kid had seemed to want it to be kept secret, so Dante had honored his privacy well.

Dante thinks about maybe turning them away, but he’ll have to go and explain Nero’s absence to them at some point in time, and his mind helpfully supplies him with the thought that this, too, is another effective distraction.

“Hey,” he greets in a far steadier tone than he thought he could manage. 

He thinks about saying more, maybe throwing in a quip or two about how easily they’d shown up at his place, uninvited, but his words feel oddly stuck in his throat, which is suddenly constricted and dry.

They turn their heads towards him at the sound of his voice, and he sees, for an instant, a flash of their smiles from a time when everything was okay. Dante tries to memorize it, tries to plaster it on the insides of his eyelids so that he doesn’t have to see anything else, doesn’t have to notice the way their gazes cloud over with confusion as their eyes slide over to the empty spot next to Dante’s side.

By some miracle or higher power above, they don’t ask him about Nero’s conspicuous absence. Trish softens her tone and Lady refrains from making any particularly sarcastic comments as they make themselves comfortable at Dante’s table.

Dante blinks at them for a long moment, forced to stand still until he can yank his mind away from the cloud it’s been drifting on and get it to catch up with the rest of the world again. His feet carry him to the fridge, and his hands open it up without permission, and he reaches past the jug of milk that only Nero ever drank from and tugs out the pizza leftovers from yesterday.

He doesn’t know when he cleaned it up, doesn’t remember doing it all, but he isn’t surprised that he apparently checked out for it.

“Nero is gone,” Dante tells them as he puts the box of pizza in front of him, the words automatically sliding out of his mouth, bitter and wrong against his tongue.

But he isn’t really, because he’s still following Dante around, his memory is shadowing Dante’s every step, and Dante wants to turn his face away into his pillow that smells like marshmallows and vanilla and forget how to see any of it.

“He wanted it this way. And we both agreed that it’d be for the best. Kid’s had a pretty long life, and he just got tired of it, you know?”

From the twin looks of horror and confusion on their faces, he guesses that they do not, in fact, know. 

He drags his hands down his face with a long sigh, kicking out one of the chairs at the kitchen table and dropping himself into it heavily, resting his elbows on the surface in front of him. He feels oddly exhausted--he isn’t entirely sure how much sleep he got last night, but it wasn’t significantly less than the normal amount.

But now his energy is gone, perhaps drained by the effort of staying outside of his own head for so long, and with the amount of time it takes for him to gather up the ability to speak again, he’s honestly surprised that neither Trish or Lady try to prod him for answers.

“A few months back, Nero and I talked,” he starts again, slowly lifting his head out of his hands and laying his palms flat against the table, his gaze centered on the half-eaten pizza in front of him.

“He’s had a lot of shit happen to him, stuff that he can’t forget. Stuff that he doesn’t deserve to live with. And...he didn’t want to be stuck here, relying on drinking my blood every night just to survive.”

“So you…” Lady’s tone is awfully hesitant, her mismatched eyes sparking with some sort of remembrance, and he can tell that she’s maybe remembering the way she’d pressed her spare gun into his hand and told him to keep it around, “just in case.”

“I took care of it.”

He can see the way they look at each other, how Trish’s mouth presses into a thin line and Lady’s nails dig into her palms underneath the table. They liked Nero too, he knows, had gotten around to treating him somewhat like their little brother, and he wonders if they maybe hate him for what he’s done, if they blame him for leaving them out of the loop and snatching Nero away from them.

Maybe they’ll think he murdered Nero--he did--that he’s sitting in front of them and telling them a lie to make things seem more acceptable. That he followed in his brother’s footsteps, finally snapped and decided to copy Vergil.

Somehow, the thought brings a bitter, almost ironic half-smile to his face, one that he tries to smother as quickly as possible.

“And what about you?” Trish asks, her tone wary but free of the accusation that Dante had expected to hear.

He blinks again, tries to get a proper read on them, and thinks that maybe they understand what he’s tried to do for Nero. His tired head tilts itself in confusion, his brain not quite able to process the meaning behind the question when the whole thing is about Nero. Dante’s just an accessory, Nero’s accomplice in his plans, his own feelings shouldn’t and don’t matter.

“Nero is happy,” he says in an non-answer, trying to forget the way his fingers itch with the faint temptation of grabbing a drink.

“Or he was happy. So..yeah.”

He shrugs with all he has left, which really isn’t much, one shoulder flimsily copying the motion he knows so well. They look expectantly at him, clearly waiting for him to continue, but there isn’t more to say. 

Dante can’t elaborate on his feelings or his well-being, because there still isn’t anything there. At least, nothing that he can access underneath the barrier of numbness that he’s a little too afraid to push past.

Lady and Trish are uncertain of how to proceed around him, unsure of how to deal with this sort of news. Dante doesn’t blame them--they know how he supposedly loved Nero and how Nero loved him back, and maybe there’s some kind of grieving protocol that Dante is supposed to be following, and he isn’t meeting up to the standards.

Well, he’s never been very good at following the rules, and he isn’t about to start now.

“Okay,” Lady speaks again, after a long moment of contemplative silence in which the two women performed a foreign kind of telepathic communication with their eyes.

“We’re staying with you tonight.”

To keep an eye on him, because maybe they think that he’s going to do something stupid, or that he’s already done something stupid. A part of Dante wants to protest against this, but when he reaches into the well inside of him, everything is still empty, so he just gives up and nods slowly in consent, nudging the pizza box closer to them.

“Do what you want,” he answers distantly, and he hears them get up around him, watch them prepare three plates of microwaved pizza and shove one in front of him. 

He isn’t much in the mood to eat, doesn’t feel hunger--perhaps a lucky blessing of his current apathy--but he mechanically picks up a slice in his hands anyway and bites off a chunk. His mouth chews the required number of times and his reflex swallows it away into his stomach, and it goes on and on like that until the pizza is gone and Dante is still refusing to think.

He lets them take up his plate and hears them wash the dishes for him, and they don’t stop him when he stumbles over to the bedroom, so he must be doing something correct. 

Dante has every intention of sleeping, at first, but when blinks again and looks down at himself, another chunk of time disappearing into the void, an hour has passed, and he’s been standing here looking at the floor the entire time. It’s fortunate that he can’t feel alarmed by this, either, and he strips mindlessly out of his clothes and into a fresh pair of sweatpants, starting to properly exert himself towards sleep.

His bare foot brushes against something soft and light, though, and he finds himself staring at Nero’s scarf, the fabric barely covering the top of his foot. 

It’s fluffy and gentle and feels like the brush of Nero’s fingers against his skin, and he shuts his eyes and remembers a half-hidden smile, buried underneath a layer of cloth and something awful inside of him begins to threaten to break free. It crackles against the edge of the barrier he’s put up, little hairline fractures appearing in his resolve, and Dante escapes the only way he knows how, putting himself peacefully out of his own mind.

When he comes back to himself again, he’s sitting on the floor, with his back against his own bedroom door, his hands wrapped in the soft fabric of the scarf. He can hear Lady and Trish’s muffled voices from the other side--the noise must have been what pulled him back in the first place--and because he needs a way to drown out the impending chatter in his own brain, he turns his head and listens in.

“Can’t believe the kid’s gone,” Lady’s voice says, and Dante is almost taken aback by the strength of emotion in it. 

He’s never known Lady to cry, except on the nights when she was especially drunk and dwelling about her father, and he doesn’t quite think she’s crying now, but the tremble in her voice sounds dangerously close to it. The girls were perhaps more attached to Nero than Dante had thought, and he just hadn’t seen it in the midst of his own feelings for the boy.

Dante feels a stirring in the bottom of his stomach again, a mixture of guilt and pity and something else he refuses to feel slowly awakening in his gut, and he thumps the back of his head gently against the door and shuts his eyes.

Trish makes a quiet sound of agreement, and in the stifling silence of the apartment, Dante can make out the rustle of cloth and the shifting of movement, and imagines that Trish has wrapped her arm around her girlfriend, pulling her in close for comfort. His own side aches with a certain kind of emptiness, missing the warmth of where Nero would snuggle up to him and lay his head against his chest, a phantom tickle of the boy’s fluffy hair against his bare skin.

“He was a vampire,” Trish states quietly in return, as if that explained everything. 

“And we know he never wanted to be one. So maybe he is happier, now. Most of his...I mean, most vampires don’t really get happy endings like this, yeah?”

Nero is happy, Nero  _ was  _ happy, and he’d definitely gotten an end.

Dante presses the heels of his palms against his eyes, the fabric of the scarf sandwiched between his skin, vanilla and marshmallows surrounding him like a warm blanket. His own breaths are shaky inside of his body, rattling against his lungs painfully with every inhale, but he forces himself to stay calm, sinking back into that numbing nothing.

He’s a little surprised that they’re accepting his death so readily, so easily taking note of the fact that Nero had wanted to die. But maybe it’d been obvious all along--Dante’s spent entirely too long looking into the sadness in the depths of his eyes, and maybe Lady and Trish have too. 

He thinks of Nero’s eyes for a little too long, then sees the way the boy had looked back at him that night, trying so hard to focus in on every little detail of Dante, to memorize him even if he couldn’t take him with him where he was going. Dante’s teeth sink into his bottom lip and his next inhale catches a little too harshly in his throat, and he’s forced to tune out the rest of the conversation for the sake of protecting himself, coming back only at the sound of his name.

“What are we going to do about Dante?” Lady quietly muses, evidently worried for his well being, and Dante curls his fingers into the fabric of the scarf.

“Nero probably would have wanted us to look after him.”

Trish doesn’t know that, can’t possibly know that. No one knows what Nero wants anymore--Dante had taken his last wish and fulfilled it well. 

Besides, Dante doesn’t need looking after. 

He made this choice himself, made it for Nero’s sake and maybe a little bit for his own, and because he loves Nero, he’d let him go, and to be upset about his choice is to regret it, which he most certainly does not. He’ll never regret it, will never regret knowing how many more years of pain he’s spared the kid from, will never regret Nero’s last, sleepy smile at him, so honest and kind and open.

Dante will be fine.

And so he is fine, for maybe two, three weeks. 

Lady and Trish hover around him at first, clearly trying not to smother him, but stepping as carefully around him as they’d done when they’d first met, with him laying in his hospital bed as white as the sheets underneath him, and them freshly in pursuit of his twin brother and his crimes. Lady’s regular insults hold little true sharpness behind them, and Trish takes on an unusually caring stance, keeping his apartment relatively tidy and making sure he eats.

Dante accepts their help, for the most part, as long as it has to do with little things like this. But he senses the way they keep looking for a way in, continuously trying to probe at how he feels and what he’s thinking, and every time they get close, his walls go up and he shuts himself away.

He can’t let them in, not when he can’t even let himself in, because every morning when he awakens from his dreamless sleep and every night when he curls up around the pillow that smells like nothing, he feels that terrible unknown rippling underneath his skin, and if he allows himself to feel it, he’s not sure what he might become.

He’s fine as he is now, going through the motions of his day and pushing himself gently out of his body when the feeling comes too close to comfort. He’s a little quieter, maybe, more reserved than he used to be, doesn’t quite smile as much, but he’s fine.

After all, he’s doing well enough that he manages to convince Lady and Trish to eventually leave him alone. They drop by every night, still, but they don’t practically live inside of his apartment anymore, don’t tail his every movement with a watchful eye and a careful expression.

They think he’s gotten over it, which is ridiculous, because there’s nothing to get over, or so he tells himself.

He still hasn’t read Nero’s letter, still hasn’t cleaned up and packed away Nero’s things in his apartment, still hasn’t organized and put away Nero from his life despite the fact that the kid was quite literally gone--so maybe there is something after all.

Dante can’t afford to investigate it though, not when he’s rapidly losing track of time, seconds and minutes and hours of his day suddenly vanishing from his life. He imagines these missing chunks of his life in his head, sees them like he saw Nero’s unmoving body on top of his bed, the whorls of smoke carrying every precious part of his being into nothingness.

It’s a little unsettling, perhaps, for him to return to his body and drift back to awareness, only to find himself in a different place than where he’d began. Sometimes, when he blinks, he’s in a different place altogether, doing something that he isn’t quite sure of the purpose of, but it hasn’t yet grown to a point where it interferes with his work life, so Dante merely lets it go.

He doesn’t have the energy to chase after answers, anyway.

So it feels almost natural to him when he wakes up one morning, his hand pressed against the cold and empty half of his bed, and then somehow breathes and blinks and lives himself into another moment of time, a moment where he’s staring into his nearly empty pantry, staring blankly at a rainbow-colored box with blobby lettering. 

It’s Nero’s cereal, packed up and neatly put away for its next use, and Dante finds his hand closing around the box. He brings it closer to his face, vanilla and marshmallow filling the air when he pops the cardboard lid open.

He doesn’t feel completely in control of himself as he floats over to the fridge, feels like an untied balloon, being tugged whichever way by the wind, and he wonders if he knows that it’s his own hand that’s reaching for the milk, a fresh gallon of it that maybe Lady or Trish or even himself bought recently.

Dante’s world shifts again, and then he’s sitting at his own kitchen table, an empty bowl in front of him with a spoon laid gently next to it. He hears the rattle of the cereal filling up his bowl, the sloshing of the milk as it spills out over the sides, and then something sweet and sticky and strangely crunchy bites against his tongue, marshmallow and cereal and sweetened milk in his mouth and down his throat.

It’s Nero’s cereal, and he shuts his eyes and remembers sunlit mornings, remembers the way that Nero wiggled his way out of his arms and traced the edge of his jaw with his slender fingers. Dante hears the sound of the kitchen and sees the light filtering in through the open blinds and catching on the edge of Nero’s smile as the kid grinned around the spoon in his mouth, swallowing down a mouthful of marshmallow and cereal.

It tastes like Nero’s kiss, his first one and his last one and all the little ones in between, the shy ones Nero would give him when he’d thought Dante was asleep, the casual pecks Dante would put on Nero’s cheek and head, the deeply affectionate ones where he’d pull down Nero’s scarf and kiss him fully, right on that innocent, sweet little smile of his and tell him that he loved him--

Dante feels a violent wave of nausea in his gut, and his chair screeches against the tiles of his floor as he shoves himself away from the table. He’s fully stuck inside of himself now, can’t get away from his head no matter how hard he tries, and by the time he drops to his knees in front of the toilet, there’s a slow-burning panic rising in his gut, and he feels the awful something returning in full force, prickling against his skin.

He shuts his eyes against the sudden sting in them and brings his hands upwards, pressing them hard against his face and trying to will himself to stop, but he feels like he’s stuck on a speeding train without any brakes. 

His breaths are coming in fast and shallow through his gritted teeth, and his jaw is clenched so tightly that his head aches from the force of it, and he sees and feels and hears Nero at the edge of every one of his trembling exhales.

Nero had knelt on this same floor with him, Nero had walked everywhere in his apartment, Nero had laid in his bed and Nero had lived in Dante’s own life, and somehow, three weeks after  _ he’s shot Nero in the head, _ he’s really, finally realizing how empty everything is without the kid in it.

He feels something warm and wet leaking through his fingers, the familiar sting at his eyes and the tightness in his throat that he’d tried so hard to force away when he’d held Nero in his lap and promised to love him no matter who or what he came back as, if he even ever came back at all.

His entire body shudders uncontrollably on his next inhale, and Dante feels like he can’t get air, the muscles of his abdomen clenching painfully as he tries to force back another wave of emotion. He doesn’t usually cry, he  _ never  _ cries in front of other people, but he’s  _ alone  _ now, and he made himself that way, he took a gun and shot the person who’d held so much of his heart in the head.

He still doesn’t regret it, he won’t ever regret it, even if he’s stuck with this awful feeling for the rest of his natural life, but he’s also never wished so badly to feel nothing at all, not even when his parents died or when his brother was being beaten for something Dante himself had done, or when Vergil ran his blade through his abdomen and spat his words back in his face.

Vergil had tried to warn him, actually, he’d told Dante that he shouldn’t want to care, that he shouldn’t care at all, and maybe Dante should have listened, because if he didn’t care then the faded warmth of Nero’s smile and the chill of all the empty spaces in the apartment and the phantom weight of a smaller, gentler hand against his own wouldn’t mean anything to him.

It’s too late for Dante, though, because he already cares, he already loves Nero, he was in love with Nero, and now he’s stuck in it forever.

It’s too late to teach himself how to feel nothing, but he’s already learned how to force it.

Dante feels his body curl in on itself, his hiccuping, uncontrollably sharp inhale rattling against his bones as he struggles to catch his breath, pushing himself up on his shaky legs and stumbling out of the bathroom. He knows what he’s looking for, isn’t quite sure if they even have any left, but he staggers past his kitchen table and into his cabinets anyway, opening and closing the wooden doors with a steady firmness until he closes his hand around the neck of a bottle.

He should thank the Dante of the past, the one who hadn’t thrown this out despite the circumstances, and he should thank the Nero who’d definitely seen this in his cabinets and had trusted him enough to simply leave it alone.

Things have changed, though, and maybe Dante hasn’t changed enough.

Dante’s hands tremble as he pops the cap open, his muscles familiar with the motion as he pours out the amber liquid into the empty glass, alcohol splashing against the sides of the container. 

The drink will numb his mind, will take him back into that stage of blank emptiness he’d so desperately craved earlier, and this time, he has even less to worry about. Nero’s done enough for him, has given him the final gift of infinite regeneration, and no matter how much Dante drinks, Nero’s gift will repair the damage done to his body, over and over again, because Nero is always cleaning up after his messes.

_ What the hell do you think you’re doing?  _

He imagines that Nero might demand an explanation of him, thinks he can hear the boy’s protective admonishment ringing in his ears and bouncing around in his too-crowded brain, and a part of Dante remembers coming off of the alcohol, the pain and the trembling and the delirium and the hallucinations.

_ Good, _ Dante thinks, because then maybe he’ll get to see Nero again.

Dante reaches forward and picks up the glass in a hand, leaning back against the countertop and staring down into the liquid. He feels like he’s standing at the edge of a cliff, and the ground underneath him is quickly starting to crumble, and if he falls down now, there’s no way up, because Nero was the one waiting for him on the other side of things, and now Nero is gone.

“I don’t know what else to do,” Dante admits to the silence, passing his hand over his face again on his next painful hiccup, shutting his eyes and trying to steady his breathing, but he can barely steady his hands with how hard they’re shaking.

He lifts the glass up and drains it dry, feeling the last drop burn against his throat, and he already knows that he wants more before he’s even finished. The drink barely puts a dent in his mental state--he’s still thinking as clearly and painfully as ever, and he doesn’t want it.

The feeling of alcohol against his mouth and in his system feels too horribly familiar in all the wrong ways, but he’s reaching for the bottle anyway, pouring out more into the same glass, the level of liquid inside even higher than before.

A large part of himself doesn’t like this, doesn’t want to go back to the time where he’d lost most of his life drinking himself into what he thought was happiness, and he fights with himself for a moment longer, trying to talk himself out of having his next drink while his eyes burn and his chest hurts and his head throbs with the force of his unshed tears.

It’s too easy for his old habits to win out, for him to tip his head back and take in more alcohol with it, his mind delighting in the way it slowly starts to blanket over his thoughts, snuffing them out with a heavy warmth. He doesn’t know when he does away with the glass altogether and starts drinking straight from the bottle, or when exactly he sinks to the floor with his back against the wooden cabinets, but he feels the tears against his face and the throbbing in his chest, and not enough of much else.

_ Sorry, Nero, _ he apologizes desperately to someone who may never again hear it, and he perhaps mumbles it aloud too, his words slurred and his tongue loosened underneath the influence. 

He’s apologizing for a lot of things, for going back to the drink, for daring to miss Nero when Nero was now free, for that selfish part of him that probably still wants to chain Nero down next to him, for sitting on his kitchen floor, utterly miserable and alone, running right back to the same place he started.

_ God, I’m sorry. _

He lifts his head again, his gaze focusing on the bowl of cereal and the blur of rainbow color still on his table, and he feels his stomach flip again, this time heavy with guilt. When he shuts his eyes against the sight, his grip on the bottle in his hand tightening, Nero is in his mind again, his smile patient and understanding and knowing of things to come.

Maybe Nero had known that this would happen once he’d left, had known how lost Dante would become, wandering around in blind circles in the dark without a guide or company to rely on, or maybe he simply hadn’t known at all. 

But the Nero in his mind isn’t upset, isn’t angry at him even when he sees what Dante’s become, the pathetic state he’s in now. He just tilts his head and nestles into the soft bed beneath him and looks at Dante with those sleepy baby blue eyes.

_ Be good to yourself, Dante. _

Dante wants to say that he doesn’t know  _ how, _ that  _ Nero  _ was the one who wanted to do that, and he needs Nero to come back, he needs Nero to be here with him. 

Looking into Nero’s eyes, though, he thinks that perhaps that’s not quite the truth.

The Nero in his memories and the Nero that was in his life always look at him the same way, with something kind and pure and honest and  _ in love _ , and somewhere in between all the months that Nero learned to fall in love with him, Dante thinks he’s learned to become a person worth loving, as well.

So he’s the person that freed Nero from a life he didn’t want, the person that gave Nero his first Christmas and watched him smile, the person that found Nero in the first place and taught the kid what it meant to be human again. And he’s definitely the person who can stand on his own two feet and keep his promise to Nero’s final request. 

Dante leans his head back and exhales softly, wiping at his face with his sleeve, a strange sense of peace quietly falling over the prior panic in his gut.

He’s allowed to care. He’s allowed to feel sad, even if it was his own hand that ended Nero’s life. And he’s allowed to not know what to do with his feelings all together—but he isn’t allowed to do  _ this. _

_ Sorry I forgot, Nero. _

Nero’s little smile turns to something like fond exasperation, and he shakes his head lightly at him, saying nothing, transparent emotion dancing in his irises.

Dante gets to his feet again, his movement uncoordinated and graceless, but he manages to stagger over to the sink, watching his own hand tilt the bottle over it, amber liquid spiraling down the drain.

_ I promise it won’t happen again. _

He imagines Nero’s response, then, the way that the kid ducks his head into his scarf and peers up at him through his lashes, mumbling out a kind sort of approval into his scarf. Dante shuts his eyes and fixates on the image as best as he can, staying firmly in his own head to hold onto Nero as much as possible.

Maybe it’s from the cereal still on his table, or maybe it’s the alcohol, but Dante thinks he feels something like a light tickle against his forehead, a feather-light brush against his skin, dusted with a faint tinge of vanilla.

“Yeah, I got it,” he whispers into the darkness of his apartment.

“You can trust me with me.”

He doesn’t get a response, of course. But maybe he doesn’t need one, anyway. 

 

* * *

 

_ Dante-- _

_ I’ve pretty much been around since letter communication was invented, but I’ve never written one before. So this is kind of a first for me. _

_ I’ve had a lot of firsts with you, actually, and I won’t go into a whole lot of detail about that, because your stupid smug head is just going to go and get even bigger with every word. But whatever. That’s not the point. _

 

Dante doesn’t know if it gets easier, after that. 

For the most part, it feels worse to feel sad, and some days he wakes up and wishes again to feel nothing, wishes for it so badly that he sometimes lays on his back in bed and stares up at the ceiling and can’t bring himself to get up and out the door at all, because the rest of the world is a reminder of Nero.

He stops losing his time, because he no longer tries to crawl out of his own mind. His mind is where Nero is, and he hardly wants to get away from that.

He also doesn’t cry again, at least, and never feels quite as hollowed-out and like he was missing something as he did on the night, so perhaps that’s an improvement. He thinks of Vergil, thinks of the way his brother never cried after that first day that they found out how alone they were going to be, and maybe finally understands his brother a little better.

Nero is always doing this for him, always helping him to understand things, even when he’s gone.

 

_ The point is, you’re a real fucking mess without me, old man. And I don’t really feel too good about leaving you. I can already imagine what the apartment is going to look like once you take over it again, and it sure as hell isn’t pretty. _

_ You’re the laziest, messiest, least put-together person I’ve ever met in my entire life, and considering how long I’ve lived, I’m pretty sure that says it all. _

 

Dante goes through his home and office at one point, gathering up all the traces of Nero, because the kid’s left a lot more of himself behind than Dante had first thought.

He flips over papers and sees the red-ink doodles Nero made on the backs of them when he was bored, the idle scrawl of his compact handwriting, a particular instance when he’d attempted to copy Dante’s loopy cursive script and failed miserably. He sees the creases on them, the indents from where Nero always turned the paper over to check that he wasn’t messing up anything important before having his fun, and he puts his hand over the places where Nero’s was, and folds it up and stores it away into a box.

The stack of papers is nestled right next to the folded fabric of Nero’s scarf, which rests on top of the last box of marshmallow cereal the kid had ever eaten. Dante’s bought a box of French Vanilla, too, puts it right next to the Vanilla, just so the kid wouldn’t have to choose between the two anymore.

He still isn’t too sure what the difference is, but he’s hardly the expert that Nero was.

Vergil and Nero’s half of the amulet is curled up near the side of the box, and Dante keeps his own half back on his person, feeling its comforting weight against his skin. He looks at the amulet in the box and sees the faint smudges on the pendant, the places where Nero held it too tightly when he was nervous or unhappy or afraid.

Dante knows that Nero doesn’t need it anymore, though, because he’s comfortable where he is now.

Nero’s clothes are the next to go--most of them were Dante’s to begin with, so he’ll keep those, but Nero owns an especially precious hoodie of his own, the one he’d been wearing when he’d first run into Dante all those months ago. Dante holds it in his hands and feels the long-gone weight of rain-soaked material, the missing stain where Nero’s golden blood had crept into the threads.

He folds it up and tucks it into the last empty space, settling Nero’s rabbit plushie Christmas gift over it, along with that horrific picture of himself, which he turns face-down into the fabric.

No one needed to see  _ that  _ thing, after all--that was between him and the kid only.

He tops off the box with the rest of the little things. 

He finds the pen that he’d thrown at Nero on that first day in the office in one of Nero’s pockets, peels off a post-it note from the fridge asking him to buy vanilla and not lemon flavor, with the vanilla underlined three or four times in angry red ink. 

There’s Nero’s favorite cereal bowl, a plastic thing with cartoon ducks printed at the bottom of it, the one that Dante had tried and failed not to tease him about when Nero had become so quickly attached to it, refusing to eat his breakfast out of anything else. 

There are the coupons that Nero cut out for him while he went through their mail and they ate their breakfast together, the ones for half-price off on frozen pizza and strawberry ice cream attended to with special care, even if Nero didn’t personally love those items himself.

He clips the loose scraps of paper neatly together and puts it inside, laying the pen right on top of it.

He’s packing it all away, assembling the contents of Nero’s life into a single shipping box, and he isn’t too sure where he’ll put all of it when he’s done.

 

_ But (and this is a letter, so I can say these things freely to you. Don’t expect me to ever say this to your face, old man) you’re also sort of the best.  _

_ You’re smart and you know way too much shit about useless history, you fucking nerd, and all of your lame jokes are stupidly funny even if I totally hate them, and you somehow always know how I’m feeling without me having to go through some mushy emotional garbage about it.  _

_ So I wanted to say thank you, first, because I haven’t wanted to live for a very long time, and you know that. But spending these last months with you has been a first for me, the first time I’ve really felt like I maybe wanted to stay. _

_ I thought that I wouldn’t mind it so much, waking up every day as a two thousand-year-old undead abomination, as long as I got to see your gross, over-inflated, smug head first thing in the mornings. And maybe I wouldn’t.  _

_ I don’t know what I’m supposed to choose. I didn’t know back then, and I still don’t know now, but I do know that I trust you.  _

_ You made the choice for me, and I believe in it because I believe in you. _

 

Vergil’s storage unit is only slightly less dusty than he remembers, and Dante hears himself chuckle out a soft apology to his brother as he wipes off some of the particles from his brother’s favorite books. 

“Sorry, Verge. Haven’t been here in a while, but hopefully you’ve got room for one more.”

He carries the box of Nero’s things with him, and kneels slowly in front of the locked chest with Vergil’s most personal effects, setting the box down right next to it. Nero’s part of the family, at this point, and he’d always thought the kid and Vergil were similar, in a way.

He wishes they could have met--they probably would have liked each other, Vergil’s social awkwardness and Nero’s fiery temperament aside, but perhaps that’s for a different, better life. 

Dante hopes that Nero won’t mind rooming with Vergil, but he can’t think of a better place to put the things most valuable to him. All of Dante’s past is here, because Dante’s life has always been in the hands of other people, and Nero was the latest and kindest pair of hands he’d put himself in.

Besides, Nero seemed to like it here--he’d always been an avid reader, and Vergil’s notes and collected research had interested him. Dante remembers that he’d sometimes see the kid sitting right here on this floor, flipping through the pages of Vergil’s notes with genuine interest.

Dante rearranges the items in front of him neatly, so that Nero’s box and Vergil’s line up together, and then he sits with his head in his hands for an entirely too long moment, trying to remember how to breathe normally. His chest aches with a distant pain, something terribly bittersweet simmering in the pit of his stomach.

Nero is dead, and his brother is locked away, the two people closest to his heart so far out of reach.

“Sorry,” he says again automatically, mumbling out into the silence, reaching his hand forward to press one of his palms against the place where the two boxes met. 

“I don’t usually cry in front of other people. But I guess this is sort of an exception, yeah?”

 

_ So I’m not too worried about where I’m going. _

_ But I sure am fucking worried about you. I already know you can’t go and do something stupid and get yourself killed, thanks to what I gave you. I know that you’ve got a talent for attracting trouble, though--you did it on the very first night we met. _

_ Even though you’ve got a lot of my power now, you’d better not go wandering around in the middle of the night in the rain again, you hear me? I won’t be there to bail your ass out, and I’m trusting you now to keep all of my important shit safe.  _

_ Which includes you, if you couldn’t tell. _

_ I don’t know if you’re reading this right after I’m gone or if it’s maybe been weeks or months or years, but no matter how long it’s been, I don’t want you to be alone.  _

_ Sure, I’m not there to hover around you and bother you about shit, as much as I know I need to, but I’m not the only person in your life. You have Lady and Trish and your brother, and even though I’ve only met two of those people, I already know they’ve all got more brain cells than you do. _

_ Well, you and Vergil are twins, so maybe you’ve got the same amount.  _

_ Either way, I’m also trusting them to take care of you, just as much as I’m trusting you to take care of you, so you better be keeping in touch with all of them. _

 

“I miss Nero,” he finally admits, staring blankly at the ceiling with his head on his couch, sitting between Lady and Trish.

This is a new, foreign sort of concept for all them, really.

After Vergil’s imprisonment, they’d obviously been able to tell how unhappy he was over the state of affairs, but they hadn’t dared to pry any further into his personal life, not when he was so firmly and clearly intent on shutting them out. They were his two best and only friends, but he couldn’t let them in, didn’t know how to let them in, and ended up alone with a bottle of alcohol for all his troubles.

He can tell that they maybe regret it, regret not pushing harder and trying to help him out, for standing by and watching him devolve further into alcoholism as he ran away from his problems. 

He knows that he certainly regrets not reaching out to them for help.

He feels Lady’s gentle hand on his thigh and Trish’s light prod at his side with her elbow, and he strangely feels compelled to cover his face with a hand, a sad, painful sort of laugh tearing itself out of his throat.

“You two feel like staying tonight?”

Trish is already pulling out her phone, dialing the number that he knows is for pizza, while Lady rubs at his knee in a reassuring gesture, leaving her comforting touch against him for a long moment before giving him a weak grin.

“You know we never mind sleeping over, Dante. All part of the fun, right?”

They sit at the kitchen table and eat slices of pizza, and Dante remembers the way Nero had looked when he’d had his very first slice, the way his eyes had lit up and his shy smile had transformed into something a little more truly happy. 

Lady and Trish don’t seem to mind when he talks about it, when he rambles on about Nero’s memory and all of the good parts and bad parts and all the things in between that the kid was. They listen patiently to him, filling in some of the blanks for him, telling him some of the things that Nero did when he went out with the two of them, or some of the things that Dante missed while he was asleep or looking away or just too busy thinking about Nero’s smile.

Dante feels like a little less of him is missing, the further they go along, and he drops his head into his palm, staring down at the table, a smile tugging at his lips even around the tightness in his throat.

He wills his eyes to stay dry, and they miraculously do, but Lady and Trish offer him sympathetic gazes anyway, their lightly teasing and gently concerned voices drifting into his ears and surrounding the coldness inside of his stomach with a warm sort of light.

They’re part of his life too, as involved with him as Nero ever was, and when he blinks sleepily, the company of his friends settling gently over him, the fourth chair at the kitchen table doesn’t feel so empty.

 

_ So that’s most of it, I think.  _

_ Everything I wanted to say to you, I think I already have, or you already know it, because somehow you always do. I just wanted to remind you, in case you ever forget, and since you’re old and your brain is crusty, I know you definitely will. _

_ Which is okay. Because you can still remember again, even after you’ve forgotten. _

_ I don’t know what’s going to happen after I properly finish this. Or at least, I sort of have an idea, and I’m about to go talk to you about it, before I die. I’m assuming that I didn’t totally fucking chicken out and actually said it, so yeah. _

_ I’m probably coming back. _

_ If I get to, I’m going to choose to be a human again. I don’t know if I’ll end up meeting you again, though, even though I really hope for it. _

_ But, hey, I’m pretty good at drawing in the weirdos, and you’re the biggest one of them all. If I don’t end up running face first into your stupidly big chest, I’m calling bullshit. _

_ Even if I’m a different person and we don’t end up exactly like this again, I won’t mind. If you’ve moved on and found another person who you think you can trust and love, then I’m happy for you. But if they fuck things up, I’m coming for their ass, dead or not. _

_ You’ve always been pretty good at waiting, though. _

_ One way or the other, I’m going to see you again. Whether if it’s in ten years when you finally turn one hundred years old or if it’s in whenever I might come back, we’ll meet again. _

 

Dante is walking into unfamiliar territory again, a part of his life wholly foreign to him. He’s only been here once before, back when he was young and naive and thought he knew his brother better than he actually did. 

He goes through the motions easily, complying obediently with the security check as they look over him with suspicious eyes, eventually pushing him forwards into the double-sided room, once they find nothing particularly of note.

Dante looks up and sees his own face in front of him, on the other side of the glass. It’s a little more tired than his own, pale and slightly washed-out from the lack of sunlight, but when Vergil looks up and meets his eyes, his own gaze widening in surprise, Dante feels like he’s eight years old again and his parents are alive, and he and his brother are standing in front of the mirror and looking at each other’s reflections with a smile.

 

_ I’ve still got a lot of shit to say to you, but I’d rather tell it right to your face. No point in wasting more paper space when I don’t have to. _

_ For now, just remember to be good to yourself. And that I love you.  _

 

His brother seems unsure of how to react, frozen in place and looking nervously back at him, like he’s afraid of saying the wrong thing and driving Dante immediately away. 

“Hey, Verge,” Dante says, in a voice dangerously close to cracking with emotion, and he feels himself smiling, his heart fluttering anxiously in his chest.

“Happy birthday.”

Vergil straightens up, the corners of his mouth tilting up to match Dante’s own, and he can see the way his brother blinks quickly, his form trembling slightly as he inhales, emotion flickering over his neutral face.

“Same to you, Dante.”

Vergil says his name like he’s waited ten years to say it, and maybe he has. Dante’s been waiting for a long time, too.

 

_ No matter what, this isn’t really a goodbye. _

_ So, take care of yourself, Dante.  _

_ I had a good day with you today. _

_ -Nero _

 

Dante presses a hand against his chest, the weight of the letter tucked into the folds of his coat burning against his palm, and he looks back at his brother, finally so close to him after ten years apart.

“I guess we got a lot to talk about, huh?” 

Vergil bows his head, his fingers running through his carefully styled hair as he meets Dante’s gaze evenly, a true smile finally at his lips.

“Why don’t you start?”

“Sure,” Dante answers, leaning forward and resting his chin against his hands.

“I’ve got a story to tell.” 

He thinks of his last birthday, of being one year younger and one hundred years away from where he is now, of wandering lost in a rainy, cold night, and of a chance encounter between two strangers. He closes his eyes for a long moment, just to see Nero’s smile in his mind again, the image of Nero’s face gazing as patiently at him as always.

_ See you later, kid. _

Dante returns to his present, looks ahead at his brother, and, as with most stories, starts from the beginning.

 


	13. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HERE IT IS...the very last chapter  
> thank u so much to everyone who's been reading/commenting all the way thru and to anyone who might read this in the future...i lov all of u  
> after the Many Tears i apparently received last chapter i hope that this makes things better for U...pls accept this last danero  
> also also thank u to LUNA for overseeing this propaganda and beta reading ever since chapter 7  
> it has been a LONG journey.......and now i fall over goodbye

“Can’t believe they’re actually letting you out of here, you lucky bastard.”

Vergil winces as the officer behind him releases him from his handcuffs, rubbing at his wrists and stepping closer to Dante, stretching out his probably cramped muscles. It’s probably a sign of how actually happy Vergil is that his brother doesn’t bother to rise up to the bait, and Dante can’t help but reach out and touch his brother on the shoulder, pulling him slightly forward so that they fall into line with each other.

He feels Vergil tense up at the touch, clearly unused to human contact after so many years in solitary confinement, but his brother doesn't move away, leaning slightly into the curve of Dante’s hand. Vergil’s expression is as blank as usual, but there’s a flicker of obvious emotion in the depths of his cold blue eyes, and when he turns to look properly at Dante, he can see the way that his brother’s neutrality threatens to collapse in on itself. 

“How does it feel to be finally free?” Dante asks, to spare both of them the embarrassment of probably crying in front of the security guard as he slowly starts to lead his brother to the exit of the holding facility.

“I am on  _ parole,  _ Dante. Not quite the same. I certainly hope you do not employ such inaccuracies when teaching your students.”

“Nah, I keep telling you, Verge, I’m the greatest professor they’ve got at that university.”

“I shudder to imagine the quality of the others, then.”

Dante chuckles at the quip, reaching out to take Vergil’s parole papers from the officer in charge, as well as the small bag containing Vergil’s prison belongings. It isn’t much, but the stuff’s been with his twin for the past fifteen years, and Dante figures that he’d have gotten pretty attached to it after all this time. 

Vergil says nothing as Dante herds him out of the building, pushing open the doors and motioning with his head for his brother to go first. To his surprise, Vergil stops at the very edge of the doorframe, looking almost hesitant to move forward, staring at the world on the outside for a long moment before turning to look at Dante with a sort of lost expression on his face.

Dante feels his own smile softening at the edges as he reaches for his brother again and guides him to step outside with him.

“Hey, I got you. Don’t worry. I know things have definitely changed while you were in there, but most things are the same, yeah?”

Vergil tilts his head up, studying the sky above them, the sun sinking slowly below the horizon and tinting the clouds a shade of warm red. Dante sees the way he inhales deeply, rubbing at his wrists again and shutting his eyes, and he lets Vergil have his moment.

“Indeed,” Vergil finally says when he seems to return to himself, looking marginally more reassured than before, true happiness reflected in his eyes.

“You are as annoying as ever, no matter where we are.”

Dante grins at the sight of his brother’s contentment, blinking hard and swallowing past the tightness in his throat.

“You know it.” 

They remain silent on the drive back, with Vergil looking curiously through the window, peering at the landscape around him, at all the things that he remembers and all the ones he doesn’t, while Dante tries to keep his eyes on the road. It doesn’t stop him from looking over to the side at every red light, though, a part of him double-checking, just to make sure that his brother is still there. 

Vergil seems to understand his sentiment, because Dante sometimes finds his brother looking back, the corner of his mouth upturned and his gaze wholly reassuring. He doesn’t actually say anything, but Dante doesn’t think he has to.

“So this is your new apartment,” Vergil comments as Dante parks in front of the building, clearly thinking back on how he’d blown up the last one. 

Dante isn’t sure how to proceed with his response, of whether Vergil is alright with a little extra teasing or not, especially on such a sensitive matter of the past. But Vergil makes the decision for him as he steps forward, his half-smile turning somewhat sly.

”This one looks far sturdier. Well protected against any unfortunate...accidents.”

“Yeah, well, I learned my lesson, didn’t I? You’re gonna be living with me for the foreseeable future, so it all works out in our favor, anyway. Now, come on. You gotta see your room.”

Vergil’s room is just the no-longer empty guest room. Dante’s done a pretty good job with it, had gone out and bought a bed and everything when news of Vergil’s parole date had first come up. Unlike the rest of his apartment, which has reverted to its dismal pre-Nero state, the room is completely spotless, likely due to the sheer lack of Dante in it. 

“My room,” Vergil repeats, his tone dangerously fragile again, and Dante sees the way his brother’s steps falter in their usual steady pace, his hands curling in on themselves to hide the tremble of emotion in them. 

“Yeah, your room. I know, I know—we didn’t even have separate rooms as kids. But that’s the joy of being an adult, yeah? You get your own bed and everything. I would share mine, but I think we both know I’m still reserving that space.”

Vergil, who has come to know the full story of Dante’s months with Nero over the five years that Dante’s been continuously visiting him for, makes a neutral noise of agreement. His brother has never outright brought up the boy himself, nor has he tried to actively reassure Dante on Nero’s status, but he seems to hold the same faith in the fact that the kid will come back.

Dante unlocks the door to the apartment, pushing it open and letting Vergil step inside first. His brother surveys the wreckage in front of him with no small amount of disgust, his eyes drifting to the half-open pizza box on the table. Vergil turns to him, clearly about to reprimand him for his state of affairs, when Dante’s savior arrives in the form of a very tiny, high-pitched meow.

Vergil’s head snaps to the side so fast that Dante swears he can hear the bones in his brother’s neck crack. His brother tenses up, going perfectly still as he stares, wide-eyed, at the tiny brown kitten currently making her way towards them, emitting soft little squeaking noises as she steps around Dante’s various piles of trash littered around the apartment.

“Oh yeah,” Dante says casually, patting his brother on the back and stepping around his petrified form, kneeling down so that the kitten can jump into his arms, purring loudly when he rubs the top of her head.

“I got a new houseguest. You don’t mind if she shares the room with you, do you? Name’s Kyrie.”

The muscles in Vergil’s throat jump as he swallows hard, staring intently at the adorable fluffy bundle in Dante’s arms, and Dante suspects that Vergil does not at all mind increased contact with the kitten. His brother’s gaze flickers slowly up to him again, his mouth opening as if to say something before he shakes his head and obviously restrains himself. 

Dante rolls his eyes, giving Kyrie one last pet before holding the kitten out to his brother.

“You want to hold her?”

Vergil takes Kyrie from him with a special kind of reverence, looking more than a little terrified that he might drop her, cradling her close to her chest. At the warm contact, she purrs at him immediately, nuzzling her head up against him and practically inviting Vergil to pet her, which, after a few more uncertain glances at Dante, he does.

He rarely gets to see his brother actually, fully smiling without restraint, so in the occasions such as these, Dante can’t help but watch the sight for a little too long, tucking it away deep into the rest of his fonder memories. 

“You hang out with her for a bit,” Dante instructs him, which Vergil numbly nods in response to, far too preoccupied with the kitten in his arms to actually respond to him. 

With Vergil sufficiently distracted, Dante takes the opportunity to go put his brother’s stuff in the guest room. Vergil’s possessions consist mostly of books that Dante’s sent him to read, and Dante’s more than a little surprised to see that Vergil’s kept and obviously read through each one, even the trashy romance novels that Dante had slipped in underneath the William Blake anthologies. He laughs to himself, tucking them neatly away onto a bookshelf, unable to resist putting the guilty pleasure books in the front, just to tease his brother a little.

In one of the books, he finds every single letter that he’s ever sent to Vergil, folded up neatly and tucked away into the pages. The paper they’re on is faded and wrinkled, though, as if each one has been unfolded and reread several times over.

He decides not to touch them individually, placing the whole book on the desk for Vergil to deal with it as he wants, leaving the rest of the bag on the accompanying chair.

It feels a little unreal to be doing this, to be setting up a room for his brother, living with him after fifteen years apart. He hasn’t shared his home with anyone since he’d last let Nero go, too, so having his home be a little less empty would probably feel weird for a bit, too.

But certainly not in a bad way.

There’s a light tapping on the door, and Dante glances upwards to see Vergil looking in on him, Kyrie still in his arms. His brother gently kneels down to place her back on the ground, and she curls himself around his ankles when he stands back up, rubbing up against him fondly.

“Nothing too special,” Dante murmurs somewhat sheepishly, rubbing the back of his head. He still isn’t entirely sure what Vergil expects in a room anymore—after all, his brother’s tastes have probably changed since they were eight years old, and Dante had felt too nervous to probe his brother about it while Vergil had been sitting in his cell. 

“You, uh, you can do whatever you want with it, now that it’s yours. Other than the obvious, of course.”

Vergil remains silent, and Dante’s wondering if he’s just making the whole thing awkward and should maybe shut up when his brother moves forward and pulls him into a stiff sort of hug.

His brother has never been very much of a hugger, never one for physical affection at all, and his inexperience in this sort of thing clearly shows in the clumsiness of his movements. But he holds Dante tightly against him anyway, pressing his face against Dante’s hair, and Dante swears he can feel the warmth of tears against his skin. Vergil is trembling against him, and when he speaks, his voice just as unsteady, Dante feels like they’re eight years old again, and Vergil is telling him—

“Sorry, Dante. I’m so sorry.”

It’s the first time that Vergil’s actually apologized to him since all that time ago. Even when Dante had started regularly visiting him again, they’d mostly come to a mutual agreement to simply bury the past behind them, never quite bringing it up and treading tentatively onwards. Dante’s never forgotten what’s happened, and still looks at the scar on his abdomen in the mirror every morning and knows who put it there. 

He’s been waiting fifteen years to hear this apology from his brother, and now that he has, he realizes that he doesn’t need it at all.

Dante brings his hand up to press against Vergil’s back, returning his brother’s hug and reveling in the feeling of getting to hold his brother again after all this time, his eyes sliding slowly shut.

He can’t say that there isn’t anything for Vergil to be sorry about, because there certainly is. The weight of his brother’s crimes will never fully disappear, no matter how long they wait. But Dante simply just doesn’t need to hear it--he doesn’t need an apology from his brother to know how deeply Vergil regrets what he’s done, regrets hurting him and driving him away, because Dante has learned how to feel the same regret in himself, five years and one vampire ago.

He doesn’t know how to convey any of what he’s found in words, though, so he merely tightens his grip against Vergil and hopes it’ll be enough.

Vergil breathes in slowly for a long moment before he slowly pulls away, and by the time he and Dante are properly facing each other again, his brother’s eyes are completely dry, no sign of the tears he’d shed.

Dante feels his own smile turning a little watery as he reaches out and presses his hand against his brother’s shoulder, looking straight into his eyes, and sees his own face staring back at him. It’s a familiar sight, one that Dante’s been looking at for all his life, and for the one instant, it feels like they’d never been apart at all.

Still, he’s been taught how to say what he means and to make every one of his words count.

So maybe he doesn’t need t say it, doesn’t need to act like he’s finally found his brother again when Vergil was never lost to him in the first place, but he thinks of warm baby blue eyes and gentle smiles and does anyway.

“Welcome back, Verge. I missed you.”

Vergil lowers his head, a trembling hand touching gently at the roots of his styled hair, clearly struggling to wipe his face free of any outward emotion.

“Thank you, Dante.”

Dante chuckles, feels the familiarity of the situation surrounding him like a warm blanket, and, as if reading from a script, or maybe from every kind and clear memory he’s allowed himself to have, he lets his next words fall automatically into line.

“Don’t worry about it.”

 

* * *

“Yeah, he’s settled in pretty nicely,” Dante says into the phone as he stuffs his wallet into his jeans, taking a pen from one of the nearby pizza box piles and finding the back of a menu to scribble his note to Vergil on, in case his brother wakes up in the middle of the night and happens to want to know where he is.

“Fell asleep with the cat and everything. She really likes him. That was some pretty good advice on your part, Lady.”

He hears Lady scoff over the phone, and he imagines that she’s rolling her eyes while Trish picks her nails clean beside her. Neither of them are very enthusiastic fans of Vergil, and he suspects that the feeling might be mutual, since they were the ones to put Vergil in jail in the first place. But when Dante had explained the terms of his parole and how his brother would be living with him, they hadn’t objected to the decision, either, offering their support and helpful ideas to Dante.

Kyrie had been one of those ideas--Lady had cautiously warned him that Vergil might be on edge about being around other people for a bit, given his fifteen years of being alone with only his guards, but that he’d still appreciate some company nonetheless. 

Dante had remembered their eighth birthday, then, when the night before Vergil had huddled underneath the covers with him and quietly confessed to him that he wished, more than anything, for a cat. He hadn’t gotten one, of course, because both of their parents were allergic, but Dante’s never forgotten that rare moment of soft vulnerability he’d seen in his brother’s face.

“We ever getting to see his ugly face anytime soon?” Trish drawls over the phone, her tone a little too light to be serious, but layered with a fine level of tension anyways.

“Getting a little personal, are we?” Dante retorts, but finds himself smiling all the same as he pauses in his movements, his eyes drifting to the closed door of Vergil’s bedroom.

“I don’t know. Whenever you guys are both ready to see each other, you two are welcome in my apartment. Just let me know, yeah?”

They both make noises of assent after an extended sort of pause, in which Dante imagines that they’re doing their weird lesbian-telepathy thing again. 

“Anyways, I gotta go. Don’t think Vergil’s eaten anything other than prison mush in fifteen years, and while pizza  _ is  _ the greatest substance on the planet, my brother just happens to be wrong and prefers instant noodles instead.”

They don’t question his decision to go wandering outside late at night, because with everything that Nero’s given him, the risk of Dante being assaulted by a demon and coming off worse for it is ridiculously low. Any wound he receives will heal instantly, and the advanced strength that had once belonged to Nero works a little  _ too  _ well in Dante’s much larger, more muscular form.

Nero’s letter is still in the inner coat pocket of his beloved red garment, and his words of caution still follow Dante around every day, but he suspects that Nero would understand putting himself at a minute risk for something of this nature.

“Sure, Dante,” Lady answers.

“Take an umbrella or something, though. It’s supposed to rain soon.”

Dante doesn’t think he’s actually ever owned an umbrella in his life.

“Uh, yeah. Definitely,” he says, the pause between his two sentences perhaps too long to be natural, because he receives some incredibly suspicious silence over the other end of the phone.

“Like I said, gotta go.”

He hangs up before he can get yelled at for not having his life together, then glances quickly out the window. The night sky outside looks mostly clear, although a few clouds are definitely rolling in over the moon. If he’s fast enough, he can get to the store, grab what he needs, and make a break for it before the actual downpour starts.

He sticks the post-it note on the place where Vergil is most likely to see it if he comes out looking for Dante, right on top of the largest pizza box on his couch, then heads out of his apartment.

Now that the dangers associated with going out at night are largely mitigated for him, Dante actually enjoys walking outside around this time. It’s quiet, the streets are completely empty, and he always feels his memories rising closest to the surface when he does this, feels like he maybe isn’t so alone on this path after all. 

The store isn’t far away from him at all, but Dante takes his sweet time in getting there, so by the time he actually steps into the well-lit, sliding doors of the place, it’s a few minutes past midnight. It’s a weekend, though, which means he doesn’t have to go to work tomorrow.

Lucky him.

Dante himself hasn’t bought instant noodles in his entire lifetime, so it takes him some amount of wandering to get there, and when he does, he’s immediately besieged by the multitude of flavors on the shelf. The noodles, apparently, come in all sorts of assorted, vaguely-meat related flavors, and Dante eventually decides to just sweep a whole row into his basket.

Vergil could have a ramen buffet or something. He’d be delighted, probably.

He picks up some extra cat food for Kyrie, too, even though she’s getting a little on the plumper side. Mostly because Dante can never resist picking off the ham on his pizza and tossing her a couple of pieces every now and then.

He’s always been weak to cute, fluffy faces, after all.

Dante’s just about ready to get going and take off to the self-checkout with his purchases when he feels something like a gentle tug in the pit of his stomach. He pauses in his steps, his gaze oddly drawn to the left, where a boy is standing in the cereal aisle, gazing petulantly up at the highest box on the shelf, his features half-hidden in a scarf, an umbrella dangling loosely from his wrist.

Somehow, Dante thought he’d be more surprised.

But everything feels completely natural to him--there isn’t anything but a slowly spreading warmth all over his body as his heart flutters in his chest, and he feels a lot like he’s coming home. His feet carry him unconsciously towards the kid, his shopping basket held idly in one hand as he looks down at the kid.

“Need help there?” He asks, and his voice makes the boy jump and properly turn to face him, his eyes narrowing behind the wide frames of his glasses. 

Dante allows himself to look into those eyes, at the particular, special shade of baby blue they are, looking just as young as the rest of the kid does.

“...no,” the kid says after a pause, looking back at the box on the top shelf with an expression caught between misery and embarrassment. 

Dante looks him over again, sees the way that the top of the kid’s head comes barely up to his own chest, and comprehends the nature of the boy’s dilemma. He obligingly reaches up for the box of French Vanilla marshmallow cereal from the shelf that the kid can’t manage to reach, taking it up and offering it to the boy.

He blinks back at Dante for a stunned second before his cheeks flush and he quickly snatches it out of Dante’s grasp, holding it close to his chest and ducking his face into his scarf to hide what Dante guesses is a smile.

“Thank you.”

“No problem, kid,” Dante chuckles, resisting the urge to reach out and ruffle the boy’s hair.

“I’m not a kid.”

Dante raises a brow, his smirk curling lazily at his lips.

“Well, you look nineteen. And I don’t have anything else to call you.”

“I’m _ twenty,” _ the boy emphasizes. “And it’s Nero. What about you, grandpa?”

Dante feels a warm lightness in his chest at the sound of the familiar name, belonging to someone a year older than its previous owner.

“Call me Dante.”

Nero seems to take in his name, his fingers tightening around the cereal box that he’s hugging close to his chest, and the kid looks down for a long moment, a comfortable silence filling the air between them.

“So what’s a kid like you doing here at this hour? It’s pretty dangerous to go wandering around in the middle of the night, you know.”

Nero’s flush deepens, and he seems caught between shutting Dante out and admitting the truth, evidently deciding upon the latter.

“It’s my birthday today. And I didn’t have any of my favorite cereal, so…”

Dante nods knowingly, as if all of this is news to him, rather than an old memory, or perhaps a dream, come to life. 

“A whole year older, huh? Gotta make sure you celebrate it properly.”

Nero settles down at Dante’s agreement, evidently relieved now that he’s not being judged for his late-night snacking preferences, and he glances back down at his box, seemingly avoiding staring at Dante for too long.

Dante steps backward, running his hand through his hair and feeling oddly at home in his decision. The hour’s getting late, and he has things to do in the morning, and the life that Nero chooses to lead should be up to him, free of Dante’s influence.

“Well, it’s been nice meeting you, kid. But I have to get back before the rain starts up.”

He turns away, basket in hand, and starts to step away.

“Wait.”

Dante allows himself to pause at the sound of Nero’s voice, bowing his head and feeling the smile at his lips before he idly turns to face Nero again, like he hasn’t been waiting himself for five years.

Nero is looking at him carefully, peeking out at him from underneath his fluffy bangs and long lashes, and Dante swears--or maybe it’s a trick of the light--that Nero’s eyes suddenly look much older, perhaps two-thousand years too ancient for his kind, soft face.

Then Nero blinks and the moment is gone, but Dante stays.

“...I think I know you,” Nero says hesitantly, a firm sort of conviction entering his voice as he moves closer to Dante, right until he’s almost pressed up against him. 

Dante reaches a hand up slowly and drops it into the kid’s hair, his skin tingling at the sensation of the familiar, fluffy locks against his palm, and Nero doesn’t move away, leaning slightly into his touch.

“Do you want to know me?” Dante asks, not quite a confirmation of what Nero maybe suspects.

The decision is up to Nero, though. Dante’s promised himself and Nero, has told him again and again that whatever he does with his new life is entirely up to him. Dante’s got a life of his own again, has his brother living in his home and has his pet cat, and even if there will always be an empty space beside him in his bed and a phantom presence in his home, he doesn’t mind.

He loves Nero, he will always love Nero, and all he wants is for Nero to find happiness, even if said happiness never includes him.

Nero pokes his head slightly out of his scarf, allowing Dante to see the real, true smile on his face, unfettered by any lingering sadness or emotion. His lip curls up, no longer having anything to hide from the world, and the look on his face is everything that Dante remembers it to be, open, honest, kind, and so completely  _ Nero. _

“Yes,” answers Nero, with everything that he is bleeding into his voice, gazing up at Dante from behind the natural years of a human life.

“I’d like that.”

Dante feels himself smile, an easy rhythm settling over him as he slides his palm away from the boy’s head and moves a pace back, extending his hand towards Nero, an offer of all of the worlds to come. 

“Come on, then. Let’s go home.”

Nero tilts his head, his eyes lighter and freer than they’ve ever been, meets Dante’s gaze, and makes his choice.

**Author's Note:**

> https://twitter.com/moolktea  
> i need danero friends


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